2020 Year in Review + 2021 plans

Quick explanation of this pastebin: This will double as my Speedyear in Review for this year (which is something I haven't done since 2016), and a general "year in review" for 2020, as a lot has happened this year for me.

First thing I think I'll talk about is general life stuff. As I'm sure everyone reading this knows, the coronavirus pandemic hit early in the year in January, and fully took a toll on the country in March 2020 when businesses were forced to close down and nearly everyone was required to stay at home as a result of stay-at-home orders that were issued en masse across all 50 states. As for me, my lifestyle wasn't affected too much by this, as I already stayed at home a decent amount due to the nature of my hobbies, but it did affect or contribute to affecting my mood and overall behavior. Anyone who followed me within the roleplaying community especially would know that I was very snappy and upset over the littlest things that I normally didn't get so upset over before.

As far as the speedyear in review, here it is, in order according to my current personal bests on my speedrun.com profile:

- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (Any% Normal) in 49:02
Pandora Tomorrow, alongside another game in this list, has become one of my absolute favorite speedgames and one of my proudest achievements as far as speedgames go. I took a personal best that was around an 1 hour 40 minutes and, over the course 2 full years, brought the world record down 22 minutes from what it was originally back when I first ran it, trading multiple world records back and forth with Splinter Cell series runners DirectorMusic and Sir Kerchoo (SirZeus on speedrun.com). Technically I have a faster run than this with strategies that take advantage of the fact that the game now uses load removal for timing runs, but this is the latest run on the leaderboards since time without loads hasn't been implemented on the leaderboard yet.

- Gran Turismo 3 (All Time Trials) in 25:12
GT3 is another case of a childhood game of mine that I wanted to try and speedrun. I originally intended on getting decent at this category so I could potentially submit it to GDQ, and I may do that eventually, but now I just run it for fun

- The Sims 4 (Death) in 25.720
This speedrun literally sprouted from a joke idea that me and my girlfriend came up with where we wanted to see how fast you could kill a sim in this game, and it turns out there's legit leaderboards for it. This category is entirely luck-based, and I got extremely lucky with this one.

- Outlast 2 (100%) in 2:07:24 without loads
Very good improvement, with overall cleaner play and the addition of a few out of bounds clips that collectively save several minutes. This still has tons of room for improvement though, and it shows with how far my run is from every other run above mine. A big point of improvement is the Mines segment, as I tend to hesitate a lot in that section in order to make absolutely sure I don't miss a collectible.

- Amnesia: Justine (Half-Life Out of Bounds) in 2:39.56 without loads
For-fun category that allows for modification of game files that makes the movement play more like the movement from the Half-Life games. Don't really have an interest in improving this anymore, but I may submit Half-Life Out of Bounds with this or Dark Descent for GDQ or an online marathon

- Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (No Major Glitches) in 40:48 without loads
One of probably the only times I'll ever hold a top time in a speedrun of a Frictional Games game. Pretty solid throughout the entirety of the run, with only a few small mistakes. I'm only 15 seconds behind the world record, so I may go for it someday, but idk when.

- Anodyne (Any%) in 4:58.967
Sub 5 in Anodyne is a big deal considering how optimized this game is, so I'm happy with this time. May do short bursts of grinding in the future to try to get a high 4:56

- Air Control (times listed below)
1. Casual 2 in 4:26
2. Casual 1 in 4:47
3. Casual 1 100% in 9:51

I inadvertently went on a flipping tear with this game's leaderboards, now holding 4 world records. I don't intend to improve this any further, but I may try the Full Game category as I attempt to get this into GDQ again for SGDQ 2021.

- Super Captain Falcon 64 (1 Star) in 7:39
Another for-fun speedrun that I picked up after seeing a funny video about it from a Super Mario 64 speedrunner named Simply

- Among the Sleep (Any% version 2.0) in 17:08
Not too much to say about this PB other than it being fairly clean. I was derusting to try to get this into AGDQ 2021 Online, and PB'd by nearly a minute.

- Ju-on: the Grudge (True Ending) in 57:28
Small PB that I decided to get after I noticed a Japanese runner named Swordfish beat my record by a minute. Could probably improve it further to take the record back, but with Ju-on Wii being Ju-on Wii, probably not (at least not anytime soon).

- Outlast (times listed below):
1. Whistleblower Any% in 4:52 without loads
2. Whistleblower 100% in 15:46 without loads
3. Main Game No OoB in 38:42 without loads

The first two was a case of wanting to get up-to-date PBs to submit to GDQ (and with pretty decent times at that), and the No OoB PB came from a derust run that PB'd by less than a second. I'm practically retired from actively running Outlast 1 and the series as a whole, but I may go back to improve my Outlast 2 times. I also plan to speedrun The Outlast Trials when that eventually comes out.

- The Evil Within 2 (Any% NG+) in 1:31:49 without loads

Pretty good, but there was a bunch of dumb timeloss. Can take this further, but the glitches in the run are hard

- Manifold Garden (times listed below):
1. Any% (Standard Ending, Garnier, Wall Clip) in 4:22.94
2. All God Cubes (Wall Clip) in 22:51.09
3. All God Cubes (Least Gravity Changes) in 35:28.76
4. Reverse Tree Order (Wall Clip) in 35:34.25
5. Any% (Standard Ending, No Garnier, Wall Clip) in 7:44.35
6. Any% (Secret Ending, Wall Clip) in 2:08.19

Like with Pandora Tomorrow, I fell in love with this game's speedrun and the game in general. There's some categories I want to run still and some of my times can be improved further, so I'm not done with this game yet.

**SKIP TO HERE IF YOU DONT WANT TO READ THE LIST OF PERSONAL BESTS**

Now after all of that speedrunning mumbo jumbo, it's time to get back to the other stuff.

Going back to speedrunning for a bit, I took what was probably my first extended break from the hobby in 5 years. From around March 2020 to August 2020, I took a break from active speedrunning that lasted around 5-6 months. I did some speedruns here and there, but I never actively pursued times and instead largely focused on playing through games from my backlog. Why did I take that break? It was a combination of slight burnout and the coronavirus pandemic dragging down my mood, especially around June and July. What didn't help this at all is that throughout 2020 (but especially between June and August), multiple prominent speedrunners, streamers, and content creators were outed and exposed as either a sexual assaulter, abuser, groomer, or overall shitty person. I was infuriated that so much shit like that was happening on top of stress, anxiety or uneasiness from news relating to the pandemic and the sharp divisiveness over Trump and politics in general that was causing and still causes unbridled anger among people. In fact, it was getting so bad that I considered quitting speedrunning at one point, but I pulled through.

Now, here's a set of news that I honestly wasn't sure about including, for reasons I'll mention later: I joined the twitter roleplay community in January 2020. The reasons why actually dates back to late 2019. Around that time, I saw a few accounts where the owners of said accounts played Pokemon characters (a Hau and Lillie if I'm remembering right), and the fact that roleplay had a community at all was surprising to me, because I considered roleplaying as characters a very niche thing that hardly anybody did, shy of being a full-on actor or voice actor. Considering I *technically* had already done roleplaying in the past in 2014 in a Steam group I was in, I decided to take a closer look at the community. Come November 2019, I saw that this storyline event within the community called "Joker's Casino" was happening, mainly involving accounts meant for roleplaying Persona characters, and I decided to jump on that since I was big into Persona 5 at the time. I kept track with posts these roleplay accounts were making under that hashtag, and to be honest, I was very impressed with what I saw. While the stuff people write for roleplays on a social media format like twitter obviously won't always hold a candle to writing from an official game developer or anime studio, the stuff that I saw people post for that storyline was honestly on par with if not better than stuff that Atlus puts into their games. It had that level of "epicness" (if that's the right word) that kept me engaged the entire time. That storyline going phenomenally well was the push I needed to try this whole roleplay thing out for the first time in 6 years , by creating an account where I decided to a post-game portrayal of Marie from Persona 4 Golden. To be frank, the Marie account kinda fell by the wayside. I hardly did actual roleplays on there and instead just shitposted or retweeted things a lot of the time. I'm still keeping the account though, as that Marie account as practically an important part of my internet history now, and it wouldn't feel right to me to delete it or switch it to a different character. In mid-March 2020 though, I finished Persona 5 and went through with my original idea of roleplaying Yusuke from that game. I picked Yusuke specifically because he just felt like a good pick to me and I relate to him a lot. To my surprise, my Yusuke portrayal took off, and it *really* took off. To give a short summary, I basically went from being a joe schmoe nobody who was nervous as all hell to reply to any roleplays, to being (probably) one of the most popular figures in that community, especially in the Persona RP community. On top of that, the Yusuke account (@PaintingFoxes) ended up becoming my most popular social media presence ever, eclipsing the follow count on my main twitter account and the subscriber count on my youtube channel combined. The support for that account and my general presence in that community, when I started from nothing, is staggering, and I frankly can't thank my friends, supporters, and followers within that community enough <3.

There's one last thing about roleplaying that I want to explain. I mentioned at the start of that wall of text that I was unsure about including my rise in the roleplay community in this pastebin. That is because I've come to understand that the general impression among outsiders of the RP community is that it has a big sexual context around it and that most people only do it to roleplay sex or other lewd stuff. While I have done that from time to time and have a couple of Persona RP accounts dedicated to that, I can tell you that the prejudice I just described is completely false, and that, in my situation at least, it was actually more common to *not* see those sorts of roleplays. Rather, there would be sexual jokes at the absolute most.


Now that all of that is out of the way, what's in store for 2021?

I'll divide it between speedrunning/gaming stuff, roleplaying stuff, and general life stuff

Speedrunning:
- Grind out Multiplayer Versus in Mario Maker 2 and hope to gosh that the game lets me get S+ Rank.
- Get a decent time in Amnesia Rebirth. I enjoyed it a lot casually, the route is really fun, and I want to try to get it into GDQ or an online marathon.
- Finish a speedrun of Persona 5 Royal in a single sitting. I know the route now, came up with a reliable strat for the first phase of Madarame, and have safer movement through each palace down to where I can reliably avoid getting ambushed all the time, where the problem in my very first attempt was being too aggressive with the movement and getting ambushed a lot as a result. I'm on a 2-3 week vacation in Florida right now as of writing this pastebin, and I want to start up attempts again when I get back.
- Do a few speedruns of Little Hope. This one was practically a given, given that I really enjoyed and ran Until Dawn, Supermassive's previous game that they made before the whole Dark Pictures deal.
- Learn and run Remothered: Broken Porcelain. Horror game speedrunner Ecdycis made a video showcasing just how broken this game is, and it convinced me to try the game out. Given my history with "meh" horror games like Ju-on Wii, I decided to speedrun it too. This and Rebirth will be my main speedruns to look at after my vacation while I route Little Hope. I also may take a look at the first Remothered and the other Clock Tower games, but we'll see.


Roleplaying:
- Roleplay more Fate characters, because there's been some Ishtars, Neros, Medusas, and Gilgameshes I've enjoyed interacting with on my Yusuke
- Roleplay more Persona 3 and 4 characters. Yosuke, Naoto, Ken, and Yukari look like they might be fun to play. I also might revive my FeMC

Life stuff:
- Get a formal job of some sort, at least once the whole panic with the coronavirus pandemic settles. Given that I'm 21, I want to gain the experience of having a job so I'm fully ready to keep a job and live on my own once I'm out of college.