2021-09-24

Everything's going alright, happy to be back after a break. Been a bit since a big writeup, overdue

tldr for streams:
- Changing up my stream, much less regularly by week & moreso in concentrated bursts. No more 'keeping up' for the sake of it week over week
- Still working on speedrunning, but less so on stream, mostly offline. Winding down on RPG runs
- Long list of casual stuff to stream, mostly PSX/PS2 era JRPGs to hammer through (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14JYiuEMk7481aScVlO62UlGjwwwqq4XC7ukUUqqmv18/ )
- I mostly want whenever I do decide to stream, to be a much more fun/chill place to be, rather than some sort of stressful place for speedrunning

Speedrunning:

I take breaks regularly, to balance IRL stuff, but to also figure out what I want to do online. After going through many cycles of this over many years, being around online is both the source of my happiness & my frustration it seems. In general, for a small time Twitch partner, I've had a good ride & a fun time. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I spend my time wrt streaming & playing games, and I've a bunch of thoughts.

First off, specifically while speedrunning, I'm not really an "entertainer". It's not to say my stream / persona can't handle being fun or entertaining or whatever, it's just not really my inherent nature when I'm speedrunning to naturally balance what makes a stream entertaining. I'm a very analytical person and especially when trying to do speedruns, I end up going quiet and focusing a lot of the time, which for most viewers isn't really "entertainment". But in contrast, if I'm doing a first playthrough or something, I usually have a lot of fun & am more animated, which tends to be more enjoyable of a stream when I look back on it. Without a doubt the majority of my best speedruns have been achieved offline.

I think for me (as the runner), streaming & speedruns kind of don't mesh, which is a weird realization since I've done it for a long time, but I think it's true for me.  For example, when I speedrun JRPGs (especially in Japanese language), I'm trying to focus, while also trying consider angles such as, explaining all the minutae that goes into a JRPG run so that the viewer can try to maybe understand what the hell is happening. But when I focus too much on explaining & "entertaining", it's really distracting. Then I look back and wonder what's the priority - getting better times or having an enjoyable viewing experience? Especially for relatively small crowds? Is it really worth it? I try my best to be goal oriented, and it's really hard & a lot of pressure to try to achieve those goals. The grim reality is that I think a lot of speedrun streams turn into background noise & chill sessions for the viewer, which is simultaneously fine but also a bit disheartening to keep it up as the streamer, because it's a lot of effort for questionable reward for the broadcaster in my shoes, not doing it for money & growth. It's not really that much different for Mega Man games either. I think part of it has to do with playing overall lesser popular games, where basic understanding is not there, and it's hard to juggle explaining & executing & entertaining. But my priority is trying to actually achieve times important to me.

I very, very much appreciate how a lot of my pals and people around the community just sorta go along for the ride sometimes with what I'm playing. Dragon Quest VI was a good example - like no one really plays or knows it in the west (turns out a relatively unpopular JRPG in the west in full Japanese is a hard sell), but people are always supportive of the stream & what I'm working on, and I really do appreciate it. I've always thought that if you want success in speedrunning on Twitch for growth, you have got to choose a somewhat popular-sh game, and have unwavering consistency to it. In my case it's like, just a bit different, where I grew up around a community of speedrunners and generally I play platformers & JRPGs, and that usually works for me and I don't think about growth much. There's this factor that comes into play with streams somewhat similar to mine, where there's the "new hotness" speedgame for a bit, but the routine grind is lost on a lot of people. Because like I said, when it goes from being a relatively fresh experience where I explain what's going on, to the focus & improve mode without explaining much, it's a less entertaining experience over time, and I get it.

I am always thinking about what I want to do in speedrunning before I'm done. I'm going to tweet about my latest DQVI run later, but in general, I took a hard look at me, what I want to do in speedrunning, and my motivations & frustrations, and I think it's mostly time to put down mainline Dragon Quest and RPG runs. I was really, really deadset on trying to achieve my 2:50 goal in DQIII, and I gave it a really genuine effort, but the game just never budged, not even a little bit. I practiced regularly, played for almost 5 months straight with another month at the end with less activity, and it just never happened. The reality is that random games can be brutal and punishing, and unfortunately can feel like a waste of time when you put so much effort into something and not get any result. It's easy to just say "oh, keep trying", but a 3 hour RPG to play over and over is just, a lot of time man. I gave it the shot it deserves. I've said I've tried being goal oriented, but when so much of a run like that it out of your control, I can't help but not really feel so bad about it. However, there's a point for every speedrunner when they clearly know that their ability to play a game far outweighs their best time or best few runs, and I (perhaps conceitedly) felt that way about DQIII during the last push. There are people out there far better than me, without a doubt. But the disparity for my own progress really got to me. And at the end of the day, although I'm goal oriented and wanted to succeed, I really just like, stopped having fun. Upon introspection, it's pretty silly to continue. And I fear that trying to get into other similar competitive RPGs will yield the same result (though I do think that Dragon Quest is very hard as a series to play consistently well & get rewarded). It's all just a lot of time investment, to properly learn complex RPGs, and it's a good time to start winding down. This is my vain hot take, but I see a lot of RPGs out there that look so easy to understand & run compared to mainline Dragon Quest (I try to exercise temperance in most community things, but this I feel strongly, heh). And although I missed my goal for Dragon Quest III, learning Dragon Quest VI and hitting my self imposed goaltime of sub-8h finished wonderfully well and I'm really happy/proud about it. So it's better to wrap up these harder goals on a nicer, high note.

Caveats for RPG speedgames:
- I still want to return to Dragon Warrior Monsters any% in English, my very first RPG speedgame, and finish it with all my learnings & experience from when I started seriously speedrunning in 2013. A ~2 hour RPG is quite reasonable, and I love this game, so it'll be fun when I start it again. It's very different than mainline Dragon Quest.
- The ocassional random run of any game really, I'm mostly talking above about like, really trying to grind out better times
- I reserve the right to play & run Arc Rise Fantasia whenever!

I try not to talk in ultimatums about my speedrun career (how many speedrunners do you know go out of retirement?), but holding myself generally to some idea of winding down the RPG speedgame life is the right call for me personally. I took a look at my Dragon Quest runs, and although some are better than others, I'm proud of all of them. Dragon Quest is special to me, because when I started there was so much knowledge the Japanese runners just knew & had for the series, and I tried really hard to understand & proliferate that familiarity for my own runs and to other people. But my runs are alright. I remember when I was playing Dragon Warrior Monsters in 2013 as my first RPG speedgame, thinking I'd maybe never be able to run a full length Japanese mainline game. Now, I've learned a lot about the Japanese language and have run Dragon Quest 3, 4, 6 and 9 on various platforms in English and Japanese.

For other types of speedgames, like I said in a previous writeup, I mostly want to just focus on Mega Man series. Still working on Mega Man 8, but after pushing Dragon Quest for awhile, just on a bit of a break. But like I was saying above, I'd probably mostly do this offstream at this point. I do have an outstanding goal for ALTTP for 1:30 NMG, but we'll see about that one - could be fun, if the urge comes up

When I think about speedrunning, I always wanted to leave some sort of mark, or representation that I was here, tried to do it pretty well, and be remembered for it. I never played very popular games- for example, Dragon Quest was never going to be the way to public popularity. Especially when you don't have mainline series WORLD RECORDS!! (but good luck on that endeavor, westerners). But I think outside of some shorter games I think I can contribute to still, like Rockman series, I feel alright about the whole thing. It's been a good ride, and despite what some people might say about playing games casually or ocassionally playing a randomizer, you can do all those things and still deeply care about speedgaming, and that's me. I don't plan on stopping speedgaming anytime soon

I guess I write all this up somewhat formally about speedrunning for both collection of my thoughts and to be accountable for what I say & do. It might seem a bit much sometimes but I think philosophically it's important to say what you mean & not be hypocritical, that's all really



Streaming:

In the 6 years I've been a partner, I had exactly 1 day of sub goals (my "partner celebration" stream, which was shortly after getting partnered). It's just not really part of my nature to want to do the whole streamer-growth side of things - I'm not faulting those that do, but I just have historically tried to run a casual & chill stream. I have never cared specifically about doing things to boost viewership growth & monetary income, but in the last few years I very much do care about having a consistent stream experience specific to my channel, which is why I offloaded a lot of random stuff to my alt channel. These are two very distinct things IMO, caring about viewership growth & caring about aesthetic consistency, which certainly can come together, but my point is that I care about the latter (aesthetics) and not the former (growth).

What I'm thinking with my channel is that I'm going to break away heavily from what I've been doing for years, trying to keep up a stream or two at minimum a week. It's just too much. And I'm not sure I enjoy it, and I'm not sure anyone cares. Upon introspection, part of it is on me to find other things to do, perhaps more productively. I try to be productive, but I'm always multitasking way too many things at once, and progress sometimes just goes too slowly.

However, I still like streaming a lot, and I do like playing first playthroughs and having a good time. So, my plan is to take longer breaks between 'projects', whatever it is - speedrunning, or a first playthrough, and to moreso "binge" them when they come. Play something for a few days, then take weeks off. First playthroughs are a great example- I'd rather post up and commit to a week or so of streaming a game and knock it out & have a good time, than try to multitask & juggle casual games & speedruns. For speedrunning, I foresee most of my activity will probably be offline, but perhaps routinely I'll showcase for a few days. I'd rather from here on out do a few day binge and try to PB, and if not, then either play on my own or take a break and try again another stretch of time. But trying to play some speedgames regularly on your stream and rolling the dice unsuccessfully over and over, it's not good for your psyche and it got to me a bit (a lot). And I don't think long stretches are necessarily a good watch either, to be honest (at least on my channel).

Casual list to play:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14JYiuEMk7481aScVlO62UlGjwwwqq4XC7ukUUqqmv18

So the plan is, make more concerted binge efforts to do a first playthrough, or maybe speedrun something for a few day stretch, then stop for awhile. No more regular once or twice a week streams, no more "trying to keep up" for seemingly no purpose. It's not worth it to me anymore. I enjoy my place in the community but I'm both not trying to get popular/really grow the stream, and also it's not something I would thrive at. That being said, if you see me streaming a bunch, it's not hypocritical - it means I'm in the middle of doing something in concentration that I want to crank out & have a good time.

Practically speaking, I'm planning on offline speedrunning for awhile, working on my goals, and I have a long list of casual JRPGs to catch up on for the stream, which I think are perfect for few day stretches of streams to spree. In some ways it's like JRPG stream retirement, but I do plan on keeping up with speedrunning on my own time too and ocassionally streaming them for short bursts.

Streaming is just like, a lot of effort, man. And very exhausting to recover from sometimes. And I was just doing it casually, a few times a week on whatever pattern I felt like! You can say what you want, but the people doing it actually full time & are actually consistent, get a lot of credit from me.

Other:

Part of writing this all up stems from this concept of relevancy, I think. I don't care about being popular or really making it big on the channel, I never have and I don't have the personality for it. But being known around the community, I've always wanted that, and I try to do the same for others by interacting in some way- engaging, showing up on a stream and even just saying hi, etc. Though, I've had a few jarring recent experiences where people who like, absolutely should be familiar with me in some way, either through literally meeting them multiple times in person or just by proximity, say & do really strange and rude things to both me & people I know, ranging from straight up not remembering whatsoever we met, to effectively talking shit. It baffles me sometimes how incomprehensible people can be socially. We are a bunch of nerds, but even still, gets to me time & again. But it's hardly everyone, and a lot of people are cool.

In the last few years, upon really reflecting upon it, I really spent a lot of time week in and week out just "doing stuff" online, whether its preparing for streams, actually streaming, voice calls, working on programming projects. I get caught in these execution cycles of just churning stuff out, that I look back and really wonder how it transpired so fast. Perfect example, building the dynamic generator for Mega Man Bingo, which was months of work to stabilize, which is great and all but that project just sort of happened (after the Classic Mega Man festival, which is _another_ example of something just taking so much time to prepare). Then I look back and realize that those two together took all summer to do, and that's alarming. It just sorta blurred by. I'm happy with their outcomes, but at the same time, they took a lot of time.

The reality is that for my personal life, it's a good idea to start winding down the more time intensive things, the "burdens" that extend well past just playing a game for fun. But I really do enjoy this larger community and want to stick around. To me it's about navigating 1) keeping a fun stream, 2) working on my speedrun goals until I feel like I've hit the targets I want, and 3) actually enjoying how I spend my time online.

Melty Blood!!

Lastly, I don't really talk about it much, but I am longtime sufferer of tinnitus (ringing of the ears), and without getting too much into it, it really sucks. I'm basically not burdened with any other physical or mental problems, but it's been rough lately, and there's really not much you can do about it (neurological). I try to control as much as I can for my physical & mental health, but this one is largely out of my control. It's a large part of the reason I'm always "on" - because when things get too quiet/calm, it's more and more noticeable and very discomforting. It routinely dissuades from me pursuing more interests in the music space, out of fear it'll cause more harm. I basically have to exert all effort every night before going to sleep to strongly pass out, to avoid the symptoms. I'm not really sure why I'm bringing it up, but I guess just putting it out there helps a bit for me mentally.

I have a number of other things I'm working on & excited about, but I'm not going anywhere. Thanks for reading!