Before I get to talking about stuff, I gained about 100 followers or so on Twitter while I was gone, so I'm going to give a bit of an intro to myself and what to expect of me. Hi I'm Chris, a.k.a. Shasta or Mr_Shasta. I've been speedrunning games for over 2 years now and it's something I'm passionate about and enjoy doing a ton. Same goes for streaming as well. I start stream around 8-9pm PST most days of the week, mostly doing speedrunning stuff on the Gamecube, GBA, and DS. I've routed and speedrun a lot of games, which you can see here: http://www.speedrun.com/user/Mr_Shasta. I'm also an avid Smash 4 player, maining Corrin with Toon Link and Samus as secondaries. I'll be at EVO next weekend, and I go to Mega Smash Mondays every Monday in SoCal, and sometimes Wednesday Night Fights if I'm feeling it. Been playing competitively for a few months now and trying to improve whenever I can. I'm also a furry, having publicly stated it and going to Anthrocon a few days before going to SGDQ this year. I wasn't open about this for a long time, but I'm wanting to be a bit more now. Those are the 3 main things going on with my life atm, outside of working at the family business every weekday. As for my Twitter, I mostly retweet anything I find cute or funny, and I joke around a lot so be wary of that. If you like anything I do, then sweet! Hope you enjoy what I have to offer you in that case, and thanks for following me! :>

	As I mentioned earlier, I went to Anthrocon for 2 days before I went to SGDQ, having no idea what to expect from it, and I came out of it with a lot of enjoyment and honestly if the opportunity rose again, I'd go to another con like that. It was cool catching up with a few people I knew already like Zik and San, and I met a ton of really cool new people there too with help from them. The venue itself was gorgeous, being a giant convention center overlooking a river and close to where the Pittsburgh Pirates play. There was this gigantic venue for the actual con space, and there was just so many shops and booths setup with various things. I ended up leaving there with a few new decorations for my room as well, so that's nice. I feel like I have a lot more to say, but I can't recall much atm, so feel free to ask me more about this if you're curious. But thanks everyone who talked to me or hung out at AC. I was kinda quiet and awkward, but forgive me. There was just a lot to take in and I wasn't 100% used to the environment. Just know that everything and everyone was great and I had a fun time throughout :D

	Now for SGDQ stuff:

	I couched a lot more runs than I was used to, and had 2 runs in that mean a lot to me, so I was very glad to have gone to this event to say the least! First run I couched was on the 1st day: Mighty Switch Force. It was nice being the only knowledgeable person on the couch while everyone else memed (this might sound snarky, but it was actually really hilarious and I was laughing a lot). Tony killed it in the run until he messed up on advancing an autoscroller of all things. MSF can be very brutal as a speedrun since there's no luck anywhere, but he did a really good job at it overall. I also ended up couching for Wario World and Super Mario 64 DS, which were both back to back on the schedule on Wednesday morning. I thought I'd be burnt out by the time SM64DS came up, but it worked out in the end I'd say. Wario World commentary was informative and hilarious IMO, plus Dangerless gave the game an amazing and impressive showing, so I couldn't be happier with that. SM64DS was weird for me since I ran 80 Star and the category showcased was 50 Star, but I still had stuff to talk about so it worked out. I just wasn't as familiar with the route so there might have been a good amount of downtime in speaking because of that. Also later that Wednesday I couched Metroid Zero Mission. Mickey did a great job with his gameplay, and me and Kirbymastah killed it on commentary. We both go for very informative but laidback commentary ourselves, so our combined efforts I feel made for a pretty awesome showing of the game. Finally, I couched the Kirby's Dream Land race to finish off the Kirby block. I was kind of afraid I wouldn't know much about the run since I never really took the game seriously and only ran it for races, but it turned out better than expected. Also shoutouts to TruShade for PBing in the race on his last run of the game ever. What a great way to go out! :)

	As for both of my runs, I'm really happy with how they both turned out in the end. Star Fox Assault got pushed back about an hour and a half from when it was originally supposed to be at when the marathon started, so I was actually really tired during that run and passed out for like 5 hours afterwards. Thankfully I had one hell of a run despite being dead. I felt my commentary was really on point throughout and I represented the under-represented Star Fox community well with it. Getting 18 seconds off my WR is insane to me in that setting. If I didn't mess up landing the Arwing in Mission 9 and didn't get awful luck on the final boss, that would have beaten my WR by a few seconds. I got 1st try Mission 4 clip and fast, I didn't fail either of the death warps, and Mission 2 went really well. Those were my biggest demons for that run and I was able to conquer them. Kirby Nightmare in Dream Land also went really well I'd say. I'm used to playing on an 18" LCD TV, so it took a little bit to get used to the lack of input lag and different aspect ratio on a CRT oddly enough. I spent the most time practicing that run because of that fact. I still messed up the cloud minigames a lot because of the different timing during the run, but other than that, it went pretty smoothly still with very few big mistakes. I was really ecstatic at perfect Dedede luck though, since it's rare I get that. I feel like my commentary for this run was good, but I know my voice cracked a ton and I had to clear my throat a lot. Forgive me this is something I can't really control and been trying to fix for years :(

	The event itself was great. I met a lot of people there I've been wanting to talk to and meet IRL for months now, like Pok3 and Grc. I mostly just kinda hung around and talked to people in between practicing my runs. I really enjoyed going to Mall of America this time around though. First time I went we just ate lunch there and walked around and shopped. I didn't get anything, but there was a lot of cool stores there. We even went to a Build A Bear and Brad screamed into a voice recorder to put inside a Pikachu and it was the funniest thing I've seen in a while. Second trip we went mini golfing and Brad somehow got his ball stuck underneath a tunnel with a sloped hill in it https://twitter.com/MrShasta/status/751511805290172416. Later we also went to the aquarium, which was something I missed out on doing last SGDQ, so I was very very happy I went this time. It was definitely worth it, even though I didn't get to pet the sting rays :( If you want to look through my Twitter, there's too many pics for me to link here. Finally, I met my idol Kirby https://twitter.com/MrShasta/status/751529929066450944.

	I got 4th place in Doubles with Ghoul02, then 7th place in Singles in the Smash 4 tournament here. This was the 1st time I've ever entered Doubles though in any Smash tourney, big or small. I wasn't used to it by any means, but it was a ton of fun to play, even with all the constant action that's hard to keep track of going on. Not too happy with my performance in Singles tbh because I lost both times to someone's pocket Cloud. Apparently that's a matchup I need to work on a lot because I got straight up embarrassed on my last game... I also entered the Evil Zone tournament and unfortunately did not keep my Top 8 in the world placing in the game. I got Top 12, just 1 game short unfortunately. That game is something else though. It's actually a lot of fun, even though the controls are really wonky, but I guess that's part of the fun. It's still one of the best side events to happen at any GDQ, so shoutouts to Caveman for holding it every time.

	One of my biggest regrets was not checking out the arcade more. Apparently they were adding more stuff to it almost every day but I only checked it out on the 1st day of the marathon, so I missed out on a lot of cool games it seems. Also wish I got to say hello to a lot more people. There are some people I legit never saw at all that I wanted to talk to again, and some I never really talked to personally because I was busy with something or caught me at a bad time. I was also feeling unexplainably depressed on Saturday, so sorry to anyone who talked to me during the day that time. No idea what came over me :/ Eating dinner with Rays, Gala, and Skittle raised my spirits though, so I'm thankful for that at least!

	Overall, I'm very happy I took this trip as a whole. I really needed these 10 days away from home, since it's been getting pretty stressful for me lately. I really haven't felt this happy in quite some time, not even during the other GDQ events. Really looking forward to AGDQ next year as well. These events are a much needed vacation from real life and it means a lot to me to just be there and hang around everyone, even if we didn't talk much or at all. If you're going to EVO this weekend, then feel free to say hello and approach me if you see me. Otherwise, I'll see you all at AGDQ 2017! <3