Part 2 of https://pastebin.com/z5GCkMhP
"finalized" writeup of 2020 for my speedrunning stuff

2020 Summary

Red Any% Glitchless 
Jan 2 - 1:45:53
At the time I was immensely satisfied with this run and had no intention of coming back to Red. It was a good pb other than my Erika split, and was a good start to the year. Pretty funny that I made a goals pastebin for 2020 and the very next day I had this run.

Yellow Any% Glitchless Runs
Feb 25 - 1:55:09
Mar 11 - 1:54:45
Jun 2  - 1:54:31
Jun 19 - 1:53:37
Other than the 1:53, most of these runs had decent RNG but lost time to major mistakes. My experience playing Red definitely leveled me up as a runner and I started to care more about the minutia of execution tricks to save time (mostly related to menuing). I would've been happy with any sub-Exarion time, but I was unexpected successful with my WR and have no intention of coming back to Yellow. The run was overall decently executed and had one of the luckiest E4s I've ever seen.

PSR Botting
I started learning more about botting in late March with the goal of a better Mankey manip in mind. I cannot overstate how much I appreciate stringflow for all his help and guidance on everything related to the programming side of PSR. I also want to shoutout entrpntr for answering a lot of my silly questions, and everyone else in #psr-programming. This has been a ongoing journey of learning more about how to create useful tools to interact with Gen 1/2. Over this past year, I've contributed small manip improvements, became an extra person to bug for checking IGTs on manips, and started to work on more impactful projects in the main glitchless routes (route 3 moon manip backups, triple extended 4.0). I also worked on creating autosplitters for Gen 1/2 and TCG on GSR, and I'm pretty pleased with the state of those. I still have a lot to learn, but I wanted to highlight this as a big part of my personal growth this year and am looking forward to next year.

Red Tournament
I'm extremely happy with how this year's red tournament ended up going. I had less time to enter a lot of the daily races, but I'm glad I got to join a few and have fun. I definitely felt a lot more pressure to perform versus last year because of my seeding, but I feel like I had overall played to my level finishing in the semi-finals. Gigantic shoutout to all the organizers and the red racing community; it was a hugely fun event for me and I'm glad that I was able to participate.

Red Any% Glitchless Grind #2
Nov 19 - 1:45:05
This overlapped with the above, but I'll list it as its own point for now. During this grind, I definitely leveled up again as a gen 1 runner as I began to grind more execution techniques. After watching the Yellow human theory tas, I started experimenting a lot more with alternatives to fast scrolling. I meticulously tested and timed out different strategies and methods of doing different execution tricks and refined my technique to the point where I can (perhaps egotistically) say that I have one of, if not the best menuing in gen 1. My mashing is definitely lacking compared to other runners, but I started timing more textboxes and improved my text heavy splits (Blaine/Sabrina/Hof) during this time as well. I feel like my WR was a culmination of all of these improvements. I obviously got super lucky to finish a red run on good pace with all the risks, but I'm also proud of all the execution improvements I had made since my last PB. Almost all my menus were very clean and I didn't make any major mistakes.


Closing Thoughts
In regards to IRL stuff, I'm a programmer by occupation and luckily wasn't too affected by COVID this year. I was able to transition to working from home pretty seamlessly, and I spend most of my time in my room anyway so quarantine didn't have too much of a lifestyle change.

As a speedrunner, it's rare to have runs that you can be proud of, but I'm lucky enough to have two runs that fit that criterion this year. I don't know how much I plan on branching out to other games, but it's looking like I won't be doing too many actual speedruns in 2021. I don't know if the gen 2/3 games that I'm interested in will spark my motivation to play a lot, but I think it'll be a quieter year from me for leaderboard times. Overall, 2020 was a very very good year for me in my speedrunning career and I'm looking forward for 2021.