#pastebinmonday 2017-03-13

this was a really interesting weekend for me as far as speedrunning goes.

I took an indefinite break from streaming to focus on programming projects. One was for a friend so I tackled that one first, and I didn't want to lose my momentum so I kept going on the other 4.

I made:

1) a bid war tracker that counts up cheers and donations in realtime and looks for certain text in the donation messages and counts up how much money has gone toward that message. I had to learn c# to create this, I'm still working on features for it but I'm really proud of my progress

2) an EXP charter/calculator for smrpg. this I thought was really cool, you can select one of 3 types of events (battle, chest star, party member join) and specify settings for it (what enemies were in the fight, who was wearing exp booster, how many monsters you hit) and it shows at every level where each party member is at, if they levelled up, when they're going to level up, and on which hit of the star they levelled up. you can reorder events in the chart also to make it easier. http://pidgezero.one/expchart.html

3) I released a new update for the smrpg practice app. The PC port of the game font doesn't support Japanese characters, which sucks for practice if you can't parse Japanese text independent of font. Caerulius let me use the screenshots from his Web practice tool, so now the mobile version is improved, shoutouts to him. https://sites.google.com/site/supermariorpgspeedruns/techniques/memorization-practice-app

4) I completely remade drilbot (a bot that either recites random dril tweets or creates new ones with an ebooks bot formula). I made that bot a year ago but it had no way of updating its tweet database and also crashed all the time. I gave it an auto-updater and rewrote its storage access to use sqlite instead of a text file. Now it shitposts in mine and Dorkmaster Flek's twitch channels on command with !dril and !ebooks. I wrote this one in c# too and it only took me a few hours, that was cool.

5) I made another new bot for my channel, it's just a games bot right now to add another dimension of interactivity to my channel. it accepts guesses from chatters at various points of the SMRPG speedrun (how many bombs at croco 1, what will my minecart time be, how many flowers at booster hill, how many sandstorms at bundt cake) and awards points based on who was closest. The points don't do anything but I also built a leaderboards for it for bragging rights. I wrote this in my first language, mIRCscript, and coming back to that language was quite the trip lol.

coding is probably the only thing I enjoy as much as playing video games but I don't do it as much because I don't always have any good ideas. writing all of these took me 2 weeks.

now at my actual job I'm a Web and mobile developer. I worked on these projects nonstop in my spare time, so that was like a Full 10 days straight of nothing but coding for 12+ hours a day. No video games at all, no other hobbies, nothing but creating stuff. I wish I could say I at least practiced some speedgames on breaks but I didn't.

And that's a great example of my lack of foresight, lol. This past weekend was GFA8 and SNES Super Stars. I had runs accepted to both of these, and was very, very unprepared when it came time to run them. I practiced smrpg a bit on Thursday when I started routing Culex RTA and practiced SML2 a bit later that night, and then on Saturday before my GFA8 run I practiced SML2 a bit (which made me feel even less prepared) and started trying to learn the new SMRPG route (I didn't get very far with this). that was all my prep, it was very little. Big mistake.

the new smrpg route is in beta and only the smrpg Illuminati has seen the pastebin so far. my name is in the pastebin as one of the aforementioned Illuminati, which is funny bc I didn't contribute anything to the route but I guess I'm in there bc the routers used my damage calculator to work on it

anyway, I wanted to learn the new route by the time SNES Super Stars began and demonstrate it there, but on Sunday I went and took a nap instead. as you may know, I have never even once run SMRPG without notes, and if you know me well you also know that my notes for every RPG I speedrun are interactive in some way. My SMRPG notes are a big grid of freebie-dependent strats which highlights what I need to do depending on how many freebies I have, which it selects by a counter that I update via buttons I click with my left hand. this also controls the freebie display on my stream layout. It also contains a list of shorthand notes for standard shit I forget a lot. it's hella overkill but good for learning.

anyway my plan was to update my interactive notes to have them reflect the new run, but I couldn't get them done in time and used the old route instead.

so as for the actual runs:

- GFA8 was awesome. The marathon raised over $1000 for Sick Kids foundation which is a new record for that series. The Toronto-area speedrun community is fucking awesome. This event was at a local esports bar so there was a pretty good audience for it outside of our existing attendees. My SML2 run was the last run before Elm's Super Metroid RBO finale. I was woefully unprepared for this run, and since I was trying to commentate I hadn't really noticed that the run was going pretty smoothly. At the end my time was 29:53. Not only was this a 2 minute PB, but my long-term goal for this game for this year was sub 30. I didn't think I was anywhere near getting that time since all my runs have SUCKED. When I saw the timer I was ecstatic and jumped out of my seat yelling about it lol. everyone at the bar was applauding me and congratulating me when I went over to get a drink, and then the bartender gave me my drink on the house as congrats. holy shit that felt awesome. never experienced a marathon PB before, and I've been pretty invested in that game lately so I'm really happy that happened.

-also one of the runners in the morning was late so I did an impromptu idiot pills speedrun to fill in LOL not a great run but 17:xx is pretty standard for me with no practice so it was alright

-elm crashed at my place that night, I always love hanging out with him, our heart-to-heart chats are top tier. the next morning he hopped in a call with me and seancass while they both got frustrated with me being a dumbass about power adapters before Sean and I raced idiot pills. so storyline if you feel like reading it: right before I left for GFA8 one of my two sfc power adapters just shattered as I pulled it out of the socket. so I took my other one and then at GFA8 I was having issues with my power flickering only sfc. great. so next morning I plug in my sfc, turn it on, the light flashes for a second shuts off, it won't turn back on. so my only option then is to grab a pair of pliers and break the tabs out of one of my SNESes to get it to play sfc games (or in this case sgb2 since I'm about to play that with Sean). this was an ordeal since I had to do it thru the dust cover, I don't have the right kind of screwdriver to disassemble my snes. this takes me like 10 mins of me vs my low upper body strength while Sean and Elm are just kinda bewildered at what is happening. so I finally break off enough plastic to get sfc games to just barely fit, it's working with a snes power adapter, yay! Now the problem is I wanna stream and that was the snes I use for my game boy cam. So I went to get my other snes from my other TV, but its power adapter is stuck behind a huge TV unit so I'm struggling for the next 10 mins to Get it, which I failed at. I went back to my desk and noticed that this entire time my sfc adapter was not plugged in correctly, the left prong was plugged into the right port and the right port was plugged into nothing. the adapter was never broken. I don't think I'll ever live that down.

-SNES Super Stars: ok, this one was a doozy. so you probably knew this already if you spent any time with me at all at AGDQ, but I have a motor form of tourette's syndrome. Unfortunately one of my tics fucks up my hands pretty bad, and it was acting up a lot during GFA8. So yesterday my hand joints were swollen all day and I was having a really hard time practising and I thought about dropping out (we had 5 racers so this would have been acceptable) but decided, stupidly, to go ahead with the run anyway, the run I was not at all prepared for. it was a race so I went in with no expectations. I mostly wanted to stay in just to hang out with the other racers in a call during the race but nobody else wanted to do that, which was pretty lame, so to me it was just another no-reset derust that I finished with a shoddy 2:58. I'm not proud of that run and wish I had practiced more and also not been playing with a hand injury lol.

I won the race anyway, somehow... it was a close race but I clutched it out with 200 super jumps in the smithy 2 fight and ended up winning by 22 seconds. I didn't realize 2000 ppl were watching, that's a good thing since I wasn't nervous at all being ignorant of that fact, which I guess is why I didn't totally buster out. the chat was really supportive of all our runners which was great. our community is really talented and all the runners did well. Lack and V0oid were commentating and I haven't watched the vod yet but I'm confident they did an amazing job. Lack gave me some very kind shoutouts at the end when he was mentioning the wiki, which I really appreciated.

it was also pretty cool that me being the only female runner in the race was just like, not a thing that mattered beyond chatters making some (not in poor taste, not at my expense) joking comments. what stood out to me was there was 1 girl in the chat I didn't recognize who was really happy that I won, and that's kind of a special thing. I wondered how many other women were watching and how many of them were already speedrunners or not. if me being in a marathon like this ever encourages another lady to pursue speedrunning I'll consider that an accomplishment. there was nothing at stake in this race, just 5 friends playing a game, but that's important to some ppl  to see that I guess. representation matters even if I wasn't saying anything and you couldn't see me lmao

anyway, I finished rewriting my note set for the new route. It's pretty cool, now the freebie tracker auto-updates my entire note set and tracks out when to use certain items and remembers any that are conserved from freebie-ing a better item (save ice bomb from rock candy freebie on axems, for example). I'm taking the next 3 nights off to spend time with my friends, but on Thurs onward the SMRPG grind returns with new route.