An Update

Seems that the internet problems and even possible power outages are going to continue through Thursday, as that should be the last day of the heat wave here. Due to the uncertainty of randomly scheduled power outages, I’m worried about being far into runs only to have them cut abruptly. So I’m gonna postpone streams until Friday at the earliest.

However, that’s not really the main issue I’m facing. Ever since I achieved my Pokemon Black PB, and maybe even before that to a lesser extent, I’ve felt a wave of not knowing what to play / run. There’s a lot of fun / competitive categories out there, yet I feel like nothing is satisfying to me anymore. I’ve been a lot more focused on achieving amazing times than I am on having fun in the moments leading up to them, which is also why I've been so infrequent with my YouTube uploads lately.

Yesterday and this morning I confronted that negative mindset with Cindy, and I’ve realized just how much I’ve been negative towards speedrunning recently, and probably how much of a negative / upset person I’ve been on stream. I’m in a weird state where I still want to do runs and I still can have a lot of fun doing them (even two days ago I had a lot of fun with Pokemon Moon, a game that people think you can’t have fun running for whatever reason), but recently I’ve refused to let myself feel anything but the competitive aspect of it to help myself get better. I want to improve, but I don’t want to do it in a way that’s tedious and meaningless.

I think a lot of this started when I got the Black record, or at least confirmed for myself that it was the case. Before, as well as when I got that run, I still got upset whenever stuff went wrong and I would get bored about restarting over and over again, but I also distinctly remember having fun with the attempts, enough for me to keep going for multiple days in a row. When I got the run, it was an amazing feeling because I finally felt like it was something more people could appreciate than just those of us here, and for the most part it was. I’m a side-game runner, I enjoy them and will continue to enjoy them for years to come, but I also know that they aren’t super popular / well-known a lot of the time. So I had a good bit of pride in taking a main series record, something people are a lot more interested in, as a bit of a one-off thing of sorts.

I’m not giving details because it doesn’t help anything, but basically the point that got across was people don’t like running this game, it hurts hands, 3:11’s actually free. I didn’t give it thought at the time, but I think this put me in a subconscious state where I felt I needed amazing runs if I wanted to feel good about speedrunning in general. Is it really the true cause of how I’ve been recently? Maybe, probably not since I’ve always been a competitive person and wanted to improve as much as I could to be proud of myself. But it definitely showed me that there was some truth to my negative mindset, and I think I just let it take over more recently to where I don’t really enjoy running anything. I feel like I need help seeing the joy of speedrunning again.