State of the Emptyeye 3/16

So I figure an update on how I'm doing would be nice.

tldr: I'm doing well, and happily retired from the actual speedrunning portion of speedrunning.

I started a second job in mid-November. It's exhausting (This was especially so at first, when I would get ~29 hours a week at that job, the maximum I could legally work as a part-time employee. Now, I've settled into a 20-24 hours a week range, which is about what I wanted in the first place), but I'm also happier for it. The main reason is that my financial situation, while still far from ideal, is at least now in a place where I'm not constantly freaking out about it.

Not streaming has also left me more time for casual/new stuff, even with the extra job. That's been fun; I've enjoyed what I've played so far of Final Fantasy XIII (Yes, really). Given the thousands of hours I've spent with Clicker Heroes open, I suppose this makes sense. Not so much story-wise, but reducing the core of the gameplay down to "run in a line, fight monsters, get stronger, repeat" actually appeals to what I like most in RPGs, which is the part where your characters get stronger and do humongous numbers in damage.

The question from here is "What about streaming in the future?" As far as speedrunning goes, I suppose one never says never, but I don't say things like "I'm done with X" lightly; the temporary retirement is one of the classic "drama"/fishing-for-compliments plays on the Internet, so I try to force myself not to say stuff like that unless I'm pretty damn sure I mean it (I'm sure my detractors can come up with instances where I've tried and failed to hold to this. I said I tried; I never said I was perfect). Recently changing my Twitter bio/quote/whatever has all but cemented that. Speedrunning, like "esports", or hell, sports in general, is inherently a young man's game; at 32, while I'm not the oldest speedrunner out there by any means, I'm certainly on the upper end of the age curve, and keeping myself in "speedrunning shape" is only going to get harder from here. Best to make like Neil Peart and, as he says, take myself out of the game before I wind up living out "Sadder still to watch it die than never to have known it."

This doesn't mean I'm necessarily distancing myself from the community (To the extent one "speedrunning community" can be said to exist anymore), as I enjoy doing things like commentating for the Big20 races, or otherwise helping other people with their runs in various ways. But as far as running things myself? I'm pretty sure I'm done with that.

This leaves the potential for casual streaming, or to put it another way, "variety streaming". I won't rule it out altogether in the future, but it's honestly pretty unlikely for the moment, for a variety of reasons. First, I know myself well enough to know that, once I got out of the habit of streaming/speedrunning, it was going to be difficult to make myself get back into the habit at all. For another, well, still working those two jobs, and I've been trying to hit the gym a few times a week too. Finding any time to stream at all between that is just hard. For a third, I've been focusing on games I haven't actually beaten yet. While I think my regular audience (If I would even have one anymore) would be respectful of this, I'm wary of the larger streaming culture in that regard. Also, setting up streaming stuff takes time, and I've been playing a lot of relatively new stuff (X360 and PC games) that I'm not really equipped for.

So there we go.