Things have been real hectic this past month.  I guess having two jobs does that to you.

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging much.  It just slipped my mind.  But I want to note that even corporate bloggers like to bring their minds out of their jobs and into the rest of the world at times.  Feel free to bring up your noticings of corporate bloggers trying to relate things to the real world.

And I should start logging more pretty soon.

Yeah, I've been occupied over the past week.  These kinds of things happen.

Speed Demos Archive recently held a general arcade game tourney, which had actually been going on for five weeks.  Well, the tourney ended Monday, and the overall winner was a speedrunner who, before the tourney, I'd only really recognized for his Faxanadu run.  (He also did something with one of the Zelda games, but I don't track that part of the community.)

Seriously, if 'Breakdown' decides to participate on SDA's team in this year's STGT (a shmup tourney held by shmups.com) and he's not put on the first team, there'll be a lot of explaining to do.

(Side note: I placed 11th in this same tourney out of a field of 34 participants.)


But let me detail something else with tourneys focused around high scores.  Motivation and determination play much more of a role in getting a good score than general skill with the genre involved.  Any skilled player who gets a good score early and stops submitting scores has basically painted the target on himself for everyone else to beat.  Will everyone beat it?  Not necessarily.  But anyone with any real determination will.

This is the competitive gamer's version of why it's important to keep trying, even if you think you're good enough.


(Also: Regarding my post about a rejection earlier - I've gone and submitted an even better one.  Watch for it.)

Time for me to deviate from my gaming discussion and attempt to be controversial.  I have two things to discuss here.

First off, politics.  As the Democratic primaries draw to a close, it looks like Barack Obama is going to be their frontrunner.  Let me be frank - I couldn't be happier.

Let me point out right now that I'm not sexist.  I'd have been fine with a female president.  In fact, upon looking at the track record of both candidates a little more closely, I realize that I actually can't hold anything against Hillary Clinton, despite everything my parents (specifically my father) have taught me.  There's maybe two things that could make me happy about Obama being the frontrunner and not Clinton.

1) Clinton's not originally from New York State, which is where I happen to reside, and she's one of the state's two senators (this was true when I was too young to vote, and I believe I voted for the opposing candidate in the second term).  I'd actually like to know of any law related to Senate/House candidates and residency to maybe help clarify this point.

2) Rather embarrassingly, before I actually looked up the candidates, I told some people I knew well that if Hillary was the frontrunner, I'd be voting straight-ticket Republican.  With Obama as the frontrunner, I can put this foolish embarrassment behind me; if Hillary suddenly was the frontrunner I'd have to either follow through with a very stupid idea (I HATE voting straight-ticket in any way) or renege - and the idea of reneging on a promise frightens me.


Second, the environment, specifically littering issues.

While I am not opposed to laws regarding recycling and (discouraging against) littering, I would like those people who go so far as to say that our trash unquestioningly harms wildlife to stay quiet and actually watch animals near trash sites.  Take a look at the species that actually get harmed by our trash, and realize that those victims represent a small fraction of the species as a whole.  Even better, realize that wildlife is extremely adaptive, and there's some species that will find a use for that trash.

(Note: I have an old habit of cutting up the plastic that holds six-packs together in a way that eliminates any individual holes.  I guess my old logic was that I didn't want animals getting stuck in it.  But while I doubt the truth of my old logic, that's something I've done since I was a kid, and I see no reason to stop doing it.)



I was going to add something about global warming, but it's getting late and I can't come up with something completely explanatory and intelligent, so I'll just mention that I feel the phrase is being used as a terror weapon.  If we are really in THAT deep, we're all already doomed.

Okay.

Some of my speedrunning work is being reviewed by Speed Demos Archive as we speak, and some of it is in transit.  Now, for those that don't know the review process.... at Speed Demos Archive, runs are verified by people who have played the game for which you're submitting, and you're not supposed to know who your verifiers are.

I do happen to know that I drew one of the site admins for a verifier, and I also happen to know for a fact that something got rejected.  (I know what it is, but for the sake of not spoiling it for everyone else, I won't tell.)  Let me say that this is nowhere near comparable to any other rejection I've gotten - I didn't have to wait a long time for it and I actually got feedback as to where I went wrong.  And, well, I was told explicitly.  (You'd be surprised how many rejections are implicit, leaving one person in the dark.)

I think I'll worry about redoing that run much, much later.  For now, I've got a lot on my mind.

As I said, I hang out on a site that discusses and does fast playthroughs of video games.  So I will bring up that a lot in my entries - probably more than anything else.

Anyway, the site is called Speed Demos Archive.  In addition to regularly hanging out on their forums and IRC channel, I've actually contributed to the site (under the alias AquaTiger).  Mostly obscure and semi-obscure stuff, but both Super Mario Land 2 and Mega Man X7 are games that people might recognize (and both runs need to be improved one of these days, thanks to information that has surfaced since I did those runs).  The site itself is international (and they're currently working on translating important pages into languages other than English), and the runners run a large variety of games (FPSes, RPGs, action-adventure, real-time strategy - even puzzle games and old-school-style adventure games have some showing there.  Turn-based strategy's yet to show but people have tried it).

But one well-known game that seems to have eluded these people is Star Fox Adventures.  Let me point out that I am not really a fan of the game itself - it was, however, one of the first two Gamecube games I ever had (the other being Metroid Prime), so it definitely holds a place in my dreams.  Anyway, for what's probably been three years now, people have discussed and discussed the game, and the only signs of anyone doing actual fast playthroughs are an in-progress segmented run with save warps (with its goal being under five hours) and a rejected run in the same category that very few people got to see.  I speculate this has to do with the plethora of unskippable cutscenes in the game.

I can't take it anymore, and wish to put petty talk about the game to an end.  The solution I have in mind is to take the game and beat it in one sitting, without saving - I'm no stranger to this kind of playthrough, having done it twice before with other games - and attempt to complete it below five and a half hours (the rough time estimate of the rejected run).  And even if I don't meet that time goal, I am going to do my absolute best not to accept anything longer than six hours.

Any of you gamers who've played Star Fox Adventures before, wish me luck, as I will certainly need it.

No, not a white wedding, silly.

I once had a blog a long time ago, but have since lost the information to get to it.  I've moved on from that time period of my life anyway.

So I've chosen to start a new one, where I speak up on various things.  Let me first detail some things about myself without getting too personal.

I am a gamer first and foremost.  I hang out on a site that discusses (and does) fast playthroughs of games.  So fast game-playing's likely to be a point of interest in later entries.

I do bear some interest in browser RPGs, but the only one I play now is called Kingdom of Loathing.  I have three separate accounts there, though they do not interact, and the oldest of those has been in it for a whopping ten months.

Finally, I'm attempting to be a writer.  My focus there is on sci-fi fantasy stories, and although I don't like real-life violence, these stories do have some share of vicious detail on that front.  Come on, that kind of violence can't possibly be unique.

How do I fund all this?  Well, I admit to not having moved out yet, but I hold down two jobs at the time of this writing.  And not terrible ones either, though the drive to either is very long.  In fact, where I live, going ANYWHERE means a long drive.  I'm an American living in a rural community, so we do not share in the glory of public transportation.