#PastebinMonday 11/20/2023 Directing My Mental Energies Edition

'Sup, doods!

I managed to get serious about cutting up my speedrun videos this week, churning through about half of all of the videos in my backlog. Now that I have arrived at a week long break from my day job, I think I might finally have the opportunity to direct all of my mental energies to writing down all of the ideas I have for changing my stream, the LPS stream, the LPS tournaments, just to give everything a fresh coat of paint and prepare my restart. I hope my brain doesn't rot from all of the YouTube videos I plan to have on in the background while I wander into the brainstorm.

I did run into a couple of irritations over the weekend, though, one that will distract me from the task and one that removed such a distraction. The smaller news is that one of my false teeth managed to break off yesterday. Not sure how what I ate caused that, but I will need to make an errand out of getting that repaired. The other thing might be a bigger obstacle to one of my future streaming goals. I decided to devote my recent downtime to playing Final Fantasy I on the GBA and try out a challenge run of sorts. Well, maybe two? I kinda got addicted to watching Final Fantasy retrospectives. That led to trying to beat FF1 with a single white mage, which led to frustration with the lack of offensive options as soon as I got to the Marsh Cave. I switched up my challenge to one thief because the thief in NES FF1 is trash. I was able to take that to the Earth Cave where I promptly stalled against Lich due to a lack of defense and variety of attacking options. I brute forced that fight and proceeded to Mount Gulg where I quickly decided that there was no amount of leveling I could do to overcome Marilith. I was easily dispatched at level 44. I'm not beating her at the level 50 cap. Faced with a wall and no options to scale it, I think I'm gonna put that playthrough to rest. I'd rather give that a try on stream, anyway. As soon as I reestablish a weekly schedule, I will set aside time for non-speed challenge runs. With all of the different regular segments in the vein of Tue-Gi-Oh! and Opening Round I have planned, I may need a monthly schedule, doods.

Today's (permanent) extra streaming goals (actual priority is in constant flux):

Goal #4: edit my personal best runs. I think I'm down to two videos as this 100% run managed to render overnight. Yes, the PPL 100% run at the end of Pokémon Puzzle Week three months ago. That one. I wonder how much time I will devote this week to designing thumbnails and setting up all of the uploads. I will be setting up videos to release every couple of days or so once I have them all ready.
Goal #5: script and record footage for my Puzzle League tutorial series. I have some scripts left to touch up before feeling comfortable with moving on to recording gameplay. Then I will need to record my talking points and edit it all together. This is the big thing I hope to get done before the next tournament.
Goal #6: clean up my own stream layout. I am brainstorming how I want the final theming to be. I probably want to give people multiple options, maybe allow spending bits to change the look. I don't have anything written down yet. I don't expect to get to this anytime soon.
Goal #7: maybe make a universal LPS broadcast layout. I have a base, but perhaps I should stylize one for the LPS brand. Let's just say I have plans. Hopefully I wouldn't over-homogenize it like SpeedGaming did.
Goal #8: release the Puzzle League tutorial series YouTube shorts once a day until they're all done. I really do think I need to time the release of the series with a ramping up of my streaming schedule so that I can take advantage of whatever there is to gain from releasing the shorts.

Streams are on hold until I accomplish these goals. Anything I decide to do will be of the guerilla variety and have very little notice. There would probably have to be community races of some sort in order to get this to happen.


That’s my life story for the week. Happy Thanksgiving, doods!

--Cards