Sapphire Endgame

I took a short break from streaming since I was locked out of my Twitch account due to 2FA shenanigans. During that time it occurred to me I didn't care at all about any Gold Classic time I could or would achieve, so there was no point whatsoever in grinding it. I have mused a lot about how much I have deeply enjoyed my time playing Save the Homeland, and how I came to realize that whatever time I have left doing this thing called "speedrunning" must be spent enjoying myself or else I shouldn't do it at all. While I was away I felt inclined to play Sapphire, so I derusted off-stream and so far have done a few offline attempts. It has made me genuinely happy.

I have gone back and forth over whether I would ever grind the game again. I've always known that my "redemption" in Sapphire really did matter to me, but didn't know whether I could justify going so hard at it again. I've come to the conclusion that it's worth one more go, as long as I am at peace with whatever outcome arises. If life goes according to my current hopes and plans, I really won't be doing much speedrunning after 2020. Given I move on where I want to go, I won't bring my consoles with me. I want to stay involved in HMSR, so I've toyed with transitioning to HoLV speedruns, so I could hopefully run on emulator to participate in HMV5 next February. But other than that, I really want to close my PSR chapter.

I am writing this just as general update to my few loyal viewers and community associates, all of whom I consider friends. I am trying to take the healthiest approach possible to this grind, almost as if it isn't really a "grind" at all. I wasn't sure if I would stream any of it to be honest, but now that I have regained access to my Twitch account, I figure I will stream at least some of it. But I refuse to do daily 8-hour sessions, not only because I don't have the time to do that during the day, and refuse to revert to #degenlyfe, but also because I need to be able to walk away from the game at any time in order to keep a healthy, happy mindset. This means I may cut streams short, or I may switch to StH randomly after a death. I genuinely love Sapphire like it is a piece of myself, and I'm not going to abuse that and engender hatred of it, or else there is no way in the world I will ever get the run I want.

As for my goal, naturally it is sub-2. But the time is really irrelevant. I am going for one last clean run of this game. I may decide later that I want to switch to exclusively offline runs. We'll have to see. I am taking the approach that this could take three days, or three months. In any case, the azure temptress abides.

G_heinz