Stream changes

Hi, going to try to keep this short because I want it to be readable.

I feel kind of bad because I believe that I've lost much of what I believe makes my stream special. A lot of that is due to IRL dissatisfaction with my life, but I'm starting to feel a lot better. For a lot of 2016 depression has sort of held me down and I finally feel that I'm starting to get out from under it.

When I started streaming, people watched me not because I was really good at Sunshine, but because I was a friendly streamer who had a positive environment surrounding the stream. Then I fell in love with speedrunning and started practicing daily because I wanted to improve at my game. I believe this past summer was the peak of my streaming career. Though I wasn't the best at SMS, I was definitely a top player and I also felt that I was doing a good job as a streamer in being inviting and friendly, while also focusing on improving as a speedrunner.

The truth is, there's nothing that says you can't be both a streamer and a speedrunner. It's rare, but I believe that it was a huge part of what made my stream special for a long time. I love to stream. I love my chat. And I absolutely love speedrunning. I've kind of done a poor job of showing that recently, especially with a lot of negative things I've been tweeting about groups of other streamers/speedrunners. Honestly, I felt a lot of pressure to prove that I was a speedrunner first and streamer second to the "speedrunning community" because I have a sub button and I feared being called a sellout. But I really believe that my true calling is as a speedrunner AND a streamer and I believe I need to get back to that.

I am going to do my absolute best to bring my streaming back to a positive environment. It's very easy for me to slip into negativity, especially with depression being a new part of my life, but I believe that having a stream I'm proud of again will help get rid of that.

Other changes also: I'm not really able to only stream sms anymore. Even though my hands have felt better recently, I can feel them heading towards not being good again, and I want to be able to stream without constant fear that I'm damaging my hands. Because of this I'm going to start mixing in some casual stuff, starting with SM64 casually. I've never played the game and I think it's about time I do.

Finally, I want to say sorry. I've been pretty damn rude to certain parts of the speedrunning community recently, especially those who aren't absolutely invested in speedrunning. After giving it a lot more thought, keeping speedrunning in my head as this sort of "noble cause" and being generally elitist about it is a really dumb thing to do. It's just video games, and people should play them however they want. Despite this, putting a lot of effort into speedrunning is very fun for me, so I will continue to do that. I'm going to do my best to be more accepting of others around the community though.

Thanks for reading this if you did. I'll be home on Tuesday and hopefully I can begin to get back to streaming in a way I'm proud of and in the way that made me fall in love with Twitch streaming. Without some bad times, it's much harder to appreciate the good. Let's get back to the good times and go even >>>>FASTER<<<<!