Where I've been

With this year drawing to a close, I suppose it's high time for an update. 2019 was my least active year for speedrunning since I started. In the first half, I still played the game quite a lot despite barely streaming. I spent a lot of time on tinkering with new strats and I practiced a ton. I also did offline attempts increasingly more often than online. I liked the freedom of only doing one attempt and then doing something else. I liked watching youtube videos during GSR's tedious child section. I didn't do enough attempts to PB, and when I did, I definitely fell into the trap of resetting in child too much and not finishing enough runs out of PB thirst. Despite that, I still really wanted 1:15 and had fun with the game, even though I had less time to play since my social life had become more busy than it's ever been (I even joined a band as a pianist). Then I went on vacation to Canada during the summer. Right before leaving, I put a Linux distribution on my laptop and it was love at first sight. It was already comfy out of the box, and I loved the freedom for customization it granted me. The ability to put a dark theme on nearly every program simultaneously blew me away (and the Chrome extension "Dark Reader", which can make just about any webpage dark with one hotkey, completed the package). Ever since then, I've started learning about Linux and discovering software that I like for it. Rather than optimizing movement in OoT, I was optimizing my usage of my computer itself (more on that later). Usually when I get home from summer vacation, I have an insatiable urge to play OoT again, but this time not so much. I've barely touched the game since then, and for now, that might be for the better.

As a computer science student, I'm pretty bad at programming. I didn't pass any courses last year. Not a single one. Playing OoT has always been a nice escape and a great way to feel skilled and competent, but it halts most other progress in my life. I can also blame my lack of discipline, or letting myself get distracted too easily, but the point stands that my life wasn't balanced properly. When alone, I would usually start my browser, check twitter/twitch/youtube (whose endless streams of content always offer something to waste time on), and doing anything productive involved my browser in some way. Every tab competes for attention with twitter/twitch/youtube, including things like opening my calendar. My workflow was slow and unfocused, I used to want to live in my browser because it still felt nicer than Windows itself. So I decided I don't just want to spend time on getting better at programming, I wanna teach myself a keyboard-centric workflow that I'll use for the rest of my life. I started basic. Using workspaces really helped me focus, and I came up with some keyboard shortcuts to navigate through my OS and resize/move windows, which was satisfying and fast. With my eye on the long term, I've been using Vim for a couple of weeks now and I've been organizing my keyboard shortcuts to be Vim-like as much as possible (if you don't know what Vim is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0). It's been a little over a week since I started using i3, a tiling window manager, and it's really been growing on me. The main theme throughout all this is: putting in a lot of effort now to save effort for the rest of my life. That core idea has driven me lately. It's been great to have a passion that actually feels like it'll truly benefit me. And I passed both my courses from the first quarter so that's nice.

That kinda explains my inactivity. I don't browse Twitter as much as I used to in an effort to not distract myself from getting things done. I haven't shared much on here either, I've grown increasingly disillusioned with social media in general (I deleted Snapchat off my phone). I found that obsessing over others liking my tweets makes me more self-obsessed and doesn't benefit me much. I've also started to care about my privacy a bit more. That being said, I regret not giving any sort of update earlier. Sorry for leaving so many of you in the dark as to where I've been for all these months.

My main hobbies in life operate in phases. In 2007 it was Wii/DS games, in 2009 it was Pokémon, in 2011 it was Minecraft, in 2012 it was Call of Duty (with an emphasis on trickshotting since 2013), and in 2014 it became speedrunning OoT. With this track record, I've always been afraid something would replace OoT eventually, and part of me thinks Linux is replacing it, but I highly doubt I'll ever leave this behind. I love the game and its discoveries, I love the people I've met through it, and watching highly optimized OoT gameplay will always be satisfying to me. If nothing else, I'll keep an eye out for players like CountLG and Lozoots and big new discoveries. All that being said, I'll probably fully return when I'm satisfied with my Linux setup and I feel more competent as a programmer, because then I'll be more comfortable with where my life is headed and it'll feel less like I'm escaping from it because of failure. In the meantime, I'll probably join the GSR tournament, I had a ton of fun with that this year despite not winning a single match. That's about it I guess.

(In case you care about Linux stuff, here's a summary of my journey so far: Even back on Windows, I got used to Vimium, to make my browser usage keyboard-centric. I started with Manjaro XFCE on my laptop, mostly copying my Windows setup with Notepadqq and Chrome. Thunderbird was and still is my email/calendar, and I stuck with Thunar as my file manager from the start because it looks nice and clean (although I'll eventually replace it with something more Vim-like). I set up Conky to visualize stuff like CPU/RAM usage on my wallpaper, and I really liked Evince because it could invert the colors of PDFs (so opening a PDF no longer felt like staring into the sun). Then I wanted to decrease my dependence on Google, so I started using Firefox and set up Nextcloud to replace my calendar and notes (synced through the cloud). I put LineageOS on my phone and got used to a bunch of FOSS apps on that. After some preparation, I finally put Arch Linux on my desktop, and I set up KDE on it. I started using Zathura (a nicer PDF reader since it can change the background of PDFs to a dark grey instead of black). In preparation for my switch to i3, I set up urxvt but ended up settling for termite instead (which was much easier). Setting up i3 has been my latest endeavor. I did a lot more than that (including briefly exploring programs I didn't like) but I quickly listed these off the top of my head. Edit: forgot to mention zsh and I feel like I have to, that shit's great)