SGDQ 2017 novel

SGDQ was incredible. Every year has been great, but I think for some fairly obvious reasons this one will more than likely end up being the most special one for me. Having my first ever run, as well as being the organizer of arguably the biggest run of the event, there was a lot of pressure riding on me, but I was absolutely thrilled with how everything turned out.

I guess I'll start with talking about all the stuff that wasn't revolved around the relay. Unfortunately, this list wasn't quite as long as I would have liked; I really feel like I spent a little less time chilling with people than I could have. I was actually really really nervous about everything the first couple days, I had pretty low energy and wasn't eating much, and although I didn't feel like I was nervous, I noticed it the day after that I was pretty insanely nervous all week. Anyways, let's get to it.

Went to MoA with darbian, CT, and Julia one of the early days (everything blends together I can't keep them apart lmao). It was pretty fun, we spent most of the time in the theme park. They had recently put up a Tim Horton's, so we went there and Julia suggested stuff people should try. It was pretty good, except I forgot about the 2nd donut I bought :(

The 144 Fireworks race was HUGE this year with so many more SMB1 peeps around. We took up about half the tournament room to get everybody set up, I think we ended up with 9 or 10 people? I finished in 6th or 7th I think, only missed one group of fireworks so I wasn't too upset with it.

I think? the next big event was karaoke night with a bunch of the Sky Brigade. This was an absolute blast; I don't talk about it a ton, but I actually really enjoy singing, so getting to hang out with friends, sing fun songs, and drink (a little too much) was an absolutely incredible experience. Reminder to myself that I still need to cover my portion of that sizable tab we ended up with...

The 16-Star relay went about as silly as we expected. Lawso and I subbed in MrCab for Antilles once we found out that it was gonna happen before Antilles was going to be around. I taught Cab the ez cannonless setup minutes before we did it and he somehow pulled it off haha. We had a couple of really crazy happenings, but somehow ended up getting only 2nd to last.

Finally was able to make it to the poker game this year. I did pretty well, ended up in 3rd out of 25. Got to play some hands against some people I know including darb, Julia, and Darkwing Duck, unfortunately Lack got knocked out before we could face off :P

FOGO. FOGO. FOGO. We decided to do this on Friday afternoon before the relay, so I definitely paced myself so I wouldn't feel like a massive butt during the actual relay, but it was still delicious and insane as always. Finally got to go with my boy Kronic after 2 other years trying, so glad we could do that. Hopefully the tradition sticks :)

Saturday night was the 3rd Annual Dinner with the Larices, and this, as always, was a treat. The Larices always have a delicious menu that they make for us, and it's always nice to get away from the rush of the event and have a nice homecooked meal and a relaxing fire. Both the Larices and Ryden and his wife had their babies along, and they were both pretty cute.

Ok so now for the actual like speedrunning portion of the event. Just about every day I took at least an hour to grind out stages, and did at least one run or race against somebody in order to keep fresh with routing changes. Had a nice couple of boot camp sessions with kirua; it was honestly really encouraging because other than maybe a few stages where he showed me some easier and faster things to do, he said my strats were really solid. We had a couple of really big races, including like a 6 or 7 person race that was a lot of fun. I think other than duckfist who showed up by surprise toward the end of marathon, I talked shop/raced every SMB3 runner there, so that was great.

The relay went exceptionally well. I was incredibly nervous about how everything was gonna turn out, both in terms of runs and all the setup and whatnot involved. I will never be able to adequately praise the tech staff for the insane work they did. We gave them an absolutely nightmarish setup and they made it work beautifully. The only hiccup we had was Svenne having to deal with some really nasty stuff at the beginning of his run, but they immediately set into motion and executed a plan to get him back on track brilliantly. I think everybody had a run they were fairly happy with, some did a little worse than they would have liked, but I don't think anybody was really upset with their run as a whole. It ended up being very close throughout basically all the race, which was really all we could ask for.

My run itself had just an absolutely stupid beginning lol. I died in 1-F trying to really cut the jumps for early P-speed tightly, that was absolutely nerves getting the better of me. I decided to cut my losses and just play the stage normally the second time through; I planned on dumping the whistle starting in w5 anyways, so the time loss of playing the stage and killing the boom boom was slightly less of a punishment. Then 2-3. I clipped into one of the blocks at the very end and killed both of the koopas you're supposed to use to break those blocks and I INSTANTLY panicked. I've had that happen to me once before, but it was during attempts so I just reset. But of course, it's GDQ, so "that's never happened before". Everybody said I handled it quite well, but to be completely honest, I just massively improvised and it worked out. The game took pity on me afterwards and gave me early hammer lmao. So when that happened, I was definitely in completely uncharted territory when it came to dealing with my inventory. At that point, I just went into a bit of total concentration. I had my own music playing so except for a couple times when it was quiet enough to hear the commentators, it was just me, music, and the game. I was focusing on dealing with the insanely awkward inventory situation, so I relied completely on muscle memory to handle all the stages. I think for the most part I hit just about every stage well enough. 4-2 I tried the strat kirua taught me on a whim and messed it up, but it turned out OK. The only other big mistake was dying in 7-3 (which I called before the race), but luckily notch donated 10K at that point so nobody even saw it lol. Clips went pretty well, 3rd try 7-1 and 7-9 was decent; I heard a couple of the "wows" when I hit the 2nd and 3rd first try each, so that was cool. Ended up with 1 extra bro and the middle hand, so honestly really good luck. I think the final timer was around a 55:15 or something like that, so I don't have to drive my NES to the ocean :)

I'm probably gonna write a separate pastebin going into more detailed stuff outlining the relay. I know there's a couple of other communities looking into possibly setting one up, so I'd love to do anything I could to help them out.

Finally, I'll touch on the very few runs I actually caught. This is always a shock to people that don't attend GDQs, but people there, especially runners, often catch very little of the event itself because there's just so much to do. I'll probably just list them off as I remember, so this may be a bit disjointed. I watched a little of the DKR run, that was alright. I don't have any nostalgia for that game, but the OoB stuff is pretty interesting to see. I couched for darb's CoI run, and that was a good time, I think overall we did a pretty good job of keeping it light, but still pointing out some of the interesting things in the game. I caught moments of Chelney's CVIII run while poking around the practice room, and I think he did a really good job. I wanted to catch Andy's swordless run, but it was just so late after Tetris took a billion years to set up :| I did catch Dode watching it back earlier tonight, and it was insanely entertaining, if you haven't seen that one be sure to check it out. I caught bits and pieces of SM while we were out for a relay dinner, heard that was a really race haha. I woke up incredibly early Saturday morning for some reason, so I ended up watching a bit of Titanfall 2 (I literally had to google search "shooting games 2016" because I couldn't remember the name lol) and the Diablo 2 run. Again, not a ton of nostalgia with either of those games, but the runs looked pretty alright. There were bits and pieces of other runs that I caught as we left the TV on a few nights as we were falling asleep, but I remember basically nothing of them. The one run I absolutely made sure to catch however, was Dode's Super Panga World run. I knew that this was going to be an insanely good run, from both a gameplay and commentary standpoint, and those boys all delivered in spades. This is another one that I absolutely recommend checking out if you missed it, there's a reason it got a great time slot. So I guess I watched a little more of the event than I thought after writing it all out, but there's still some runs I might take some time to check out down the line.

As I mentioned at the top of this pastebin, this was an absolutely incredible experience yet again, and I think this SGDQ will likely always have a special place in my heart. I can't thank everybody enough for all the hard work they put into making our relay the massive success it was, and I got to meet and hang out with some amazing old and new friends. Look forward to a massive photo dump in the next day or two. I'm still planning on making it to AGDQ 2018, but for now I think it'll be nice to sit back and work on non-GDQ related things for a bit (coming soon to a future pastebin near you).

Thank you very much for read, until next time!

<3 Glib