-30-

It snuck up on me this year, but I turned 30 years old earlier this month. The past few years, the time leading up to my birthday has produced much existential grief about my rapidly expiring youth, with the realization I was nearing the end of my 20s. This year, it came and went uneventfully for whatever reason.

I originally intended 2018 to be the final year I would do stuff with speedrunning/video games. I ended up taking 3 months off from Oct 2017 - Jan 2018, and haven't pressed as hard with projects for much of this year, so in classic fashion I've extended my stay. But I did want to set a timeline in advance, and my intention is to wrap up my involvement with speedrunning projects (and video game stuff in general) within the next 6-12 months (depending on the number/duration of breaks I take).

There is an endless loop of new things to explore in these games, and they have served as a useful personal distraction the last few years. Ultimately though, the way I am wired, I know I won't end up looking back fondly on all the time I spent playing, tinkering with, and/or speedrunning video games when I get into my 40s/50s, and I want to concentrate my focus on other things in life before I get too far into my 30s.

The primary goal with my remaining time will be to get to an acceptable level of closure as it pertains to knowledge documentation, routing ideas, programming tools, etc. for the Gen 1-2 games. Community members are going to continue coming and going over time, and it would be nice to centralize and organize as much Pokémon speedrunning knowledge as possible for posterity. Too much information is currently locked up in the recesses of Discord, or in the minds of a handful of people, and relieving some of this weight will make it much easier to detach myself when the time comes to do so.

Category-wise, I've done runs of everything I truly wanted to get to at some point. Crystal Battle Tower was an on-and-off obsession of mine for close to 3 years, and I had thought it unlikely to ever find a <= 7 badge route consistent enough to my liking (my rough goal was 70% per battle for a sane grind, or 60% per battle as a bare minimum). The fact I got a 4 badge route to come in around 85% per battle is massively satisfying, and I am perfectly fine leaving the run at sub-2 if I run out of time to improve it.

I will most likely touch Gold glitched stuff before riding off into the sunset, including Gold 251 in particular. That run has garnered the most general interest of anything I've done in speedrunning by far, and since there are several hours of timesave from discoveries since the inaugural run, I feel a bit obligated to improve it. Gold 251 will likely be my last hurrah stream-wise, so I will probably announce a date/time in advance, whenever routing and other preparations are wrapped up.

Beyond that, I'm sure I'll find a few diversions, among which will probably be improving Gen 2 manips a bit more. Ideally, RNG manip knowledge and botting capabilities can be made more generally accessible as well, though it's not trivial to figure out how best to do this. I'm open to hearing any other suggestions people have that they'd like me to get to before I disappear into the ether for good.

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PSR Bucket List

April:
  - Gold Any% No ACE (new sub-30 potential route)
  - Pocket Bowling Tournament Mode (blame TASvideos April Fools Day 2019 submissions for this digression)

Do offline runs for both to get a good sense of goal times; stop when I have runs I'm reasonably happy with.

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After that? Really not sure. There are things I know I probably *should* do, but my desire to just be done with this stuff is at an all-time high. Category extensions were nice to get off the ground, but apart from that, I've found little enjoyment at all with PSR so far in 2019. Motivation to work on stuff just isn't there anymore, and I'm feeling more and more at peace with just moving on for good.

For posterity, these are the things I feel most compelled to work on, if I do continue:
  - Gold 251
  - New Raikou manip for Crystal (for wsopboy91)
  - Cynaquil manip for Gold/Silver (for ryziken)
  - Backlog of scripts, tools, and route notes that aren't currently public

Grander plans I've mentioned before (e.g. centralized source of Gen 1-2 information, accessible manip searching tools) are almost certainly no longer in the cards for me. Something like Crystal Any% checksum collision RTA route and improvements to Crystal Battle Tower are more of toss-ups. I'm still interested in those types of runs in theory, but they involve a large amount of prep work, and I already barely have commitment to complete 1 such project (Gold 251).

In any event, I need to soon free my mind from these distractions so I can focus more clearly on the actual important things in life. So after I'm done with my April projects I expect to take a couple month break or so. Depending on how pleasant that break is, it may or may not turn into a permanent one.

We'll see how things ultimately play out, but that's where my mind's at for the time being.