03012025

Dear diary,


# Speedrun
2024 was a pretty average year in terms of speedrunning, nothing too crazy happened. In fact, it started quite poorly with me doing a single Touhouvania 2 practice session of 2 hours and then never touching the game again until months later for ESA summer.

Then I finally learned MegaMari, a game I've always wanted to learn since 2016, after making a practice tool for it (more on that later). The game is truly impossible and took me a while to become familiar with the stages and their intricacies. It's still a struggle at times but I'm slowly getting there I think. My goal is to just get a sub 40 and I'm currently at 41:58 so still a bit to go. Initially, I was learning this game around late March but then I got sidetracked by a project I started working on (more on that later) as well as Dustforce (more on that later). It's only at the end of December that I came back to the game a bit more seriously. I kinda wish I reached my goal of sub 40 in 2024 but it's not a big deal.

ESA Summer 2024 happened and our group of friends did some speedruns of Bear Adventure after being influenced by bt. Nothing crazy, just a cute little meme game which was fun to mess around with alongside the bros. I decided to put a restriction on myself and can only play this game at ESA though.
Memes aside, I did a run of Touhouvania 2 at ESA which was pretty solid. Nitro helped by commentating the run so feel free to give it a watch if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFomsDm0Ja8



# Casual gaming
The amount of games I played in 2024 was a lot lower compared to 2023. It all started normally with a couple comfy games including the traditional Long Touhou Fangame of the year: Genso Wanderer -Reloaded-.
Then I had a good 2-3 month gap because of a project I was working on (again, more on that later) until I noticed nu playing Dustforce around May which lead to me being influenced into playing the game again. I say "again" because it's a game I used to play on and off in 2014/2019. This year however, I took it a lot more seriously after seeing nu going for all SS levels. From there I just kept on playing the game to get all SS, grinded for better IL times, joined the amazing community surrounding the game and took part in one of their events. I played the game for around 400 hours across most of 2024 which is the primary reason why I ended up playing less games in general. I'm honestly not upset about that of course because as long as I enjoyed my time with the game, then it's fine by me and I can move on with my life and keep playing the game in 2025!!

Around early May, I finally played my first archipelago with Salz (after breaking a few archipelago promises prior to that) and it all went downhill from there. Our group literally DOUBLED the day after with rdd and BossCrab joining us followed by Hope and doicm later on. We ended up trying to play a session once every week across 5 months. Solid run if you ask me but I think we were a bit too ambitious with the frequency so maybe going with once every 2 weeks or a month is more reasonable. Maybe even play more asyncs to fill the gaps in case we can't get together on some occasions. I really enjoyed them so it would be neat if we can play more of them in 2025.

Going forward, I will just keep riding the wave for games I wanna play. Around March this year, I will be playing not one but TWO Long Touhou Fangames: Genso Wanderer -Lotus Labyrinth R- and Touhou ADiA. There is also the Outer Wilds DLC, maybe (maybe) Danganronpa v3, FF7 Rebirth whenever that comes out on PC (off stream) and some small games here and there on and off stream.



# Coding
In January, I decided to work on a practice tool for MegaMari. Following 2023 where I worked on one for Super Marisa World, I wanted to keep the momentum going and make one for MegaMari. I kinda just went into this whole endeavor with no specific explanation as to why I was doing it in the first place but my ulterior motive was to learn the game myself.
The end result was honestly not as great as the SMW one I made. Not all games are created equal of course and I lack the understanding of some aspects of MegaMari, which lead to the tool being slightly lacking in terms of stability and having a fairly buggy save state feature. Don't get me wrong, it does the job, but I wish it did things better/correctly... I'm not sure if I will take the time to correct those things yet so for now I'm putting that on the side. I also took a lot of time documenting my findings when it comes to the game's memory addresses. If you're interested, the project is here on github and the wiki page contains all the info I documented: https://github.com/shadax1/MegaMariPrac

That's not all, the regulars of my stream already know this but I also worked on a small python script dedicated to ~quotes~. It's just a little project I decided to work on after seeing how fun it was to redeem quotes with channel points in rdd's stream. Main issue is that I don't have affiliate and therefore no channel points so I had to figure something out, which is why I made that script. I think it turned out great and people seem to be enjoying it a lot so I'm all for it. I try to be reasonable and only use it when I'm doing things that aren't too serious. So I would use it if I'm doing Dustforce streams, speedrun practice, etc.. I don't want to use it when I play games casually to avoid ruining the experience. I also initially didn't want to use them during speedruns mainly because I would hate having quotes playing in my pb highlight but since I discovered you can separate audio tracks in your twitch vod, I ended up using them since they don't really bother me much.
If you're interested in using the script yourself, the project can be found on github where I described each step to install it. Feel free to ask me if you need help setting it up: https://github.com/shadax1/random_quote



# Linux
Initially, I wrote something in this section but it got so long that I figured I would post a separate pastebin talking about Linux. I care a lot about this topic, and with the approaching end-of-support for Windows 10 in October 2025, I feel like it's important to share some thoughts on Linux. Stay chewned for that one.



# Misc stuff
- Between March and May, I started working on a video project I teased a bit on stream last time. Conceptually, the video I wanna work on is very similar to the recent video talking about the blue dog winning the race in MM (icymi: https://youtu.be/Y1l6Xj4PLEk). I'm working with baq to bring this project to life and while we weren't able to finish it in 2024, I'm hoping it will be finalized this year. Please look forward to it because it's gonna be a cool one!

- I decided I will quit Blue Archive after I do a final (final (real)) gacha stream on one of the January banners. I played the game for about a year and half, good run. Finally back to being gacha free.

- jk, I'm no longer gacha free because I started playing Pokemon TCG Pocket right when it was released. I think it's a fun little game to play on the side. Not sure if I will stick with it in the long run but for now I'm enjoying it.

- I didn't do shit in terms of JP studies (and drawing/art stuff) in 2024 again. Not too surprised and it will probably be the same in 2025. Deep inside my kokoro I still really want to go back to it but for now I just don't feel it, so let's not force it.

- I might go to ESA Summer 2025 but not sure yet.

- I finally moved in 2024. I will spare you the details because it was a rather chaotic experience to get everything sorted. It required a ton of patience but I made it eventually.


That's all. Thanks for reading if you made it here and I hope 2025 treats you well!