Update

Last month I was way busier than I had anticipated I would be. School assignments were piling up, and I ramped up involvement in my a capella group. As a result, I had much less time to do runs of anything. It didn't help for me that I was mostly running HGSS, a game that at best, is about 4 hours for me.

And the experience was quickly getting worse for me when I had time for it. My hands were getting more and more sore from the few times I actually did runs. Emotionally, my lack of improvement hurt, but I refused to reset due to how long the game was. I've realized that while I am not satisfied with my PB, I also have no motivation to improve my execution, and therefore no motivation to put in the work to beat it.

A little bit of hand discomfort is totally fine for me, but heading forward, I must admit that this course is not sustainable. It demands an amount of time that when I return to campus, presumably next fall, I will not be able to spare, and if I continue to push myself so hard, I will physically and emotionally break. I have felt this type of burnout with FRLG many a time, and if I am not careful, I will feel it in general, in a way that will put me down and fail to generate the friendly competition that I enjoy so much.

So I will be taking a step back for the next quarter. I'll give myself more time to do things in my life outside of speedrunning. There's a nonzero chance I get myself a job, no matter how small. I'm going to be doing more work in a capella, and I might see if I can finally put in work on an arrangement that for months now, I've said I might finish. School is going nowhere, so that'll be a major part of my life I will have to do. I recently went back to playing Pokemon Go for some reason, and honestly, I enjoy it. (Not to mention it gives me an excuse to get out of the house and walk/exercise.) And out of the blue, my humanities class exposed me to The Good Place while covering Kantian ethics and some other philosophy stuff I don't understand. I binge watched the show, and I absolutely loved it. So if I find another show to watch, I might just spend more time on the TV, wasting/passing my time in a much lower-effort manner.

That being said, I am not done with speedrunning (and streaming). There's still a lot of goals I have, though I will be very lax on reaching them. I got into running the Johto games manipless this year mainly as a way to not grind and burn out, and though I won't be spending as much time speedrunning, I think that attitude of just playing instead of grinding will persist.

The FRLG tournament is coming up next month, and I want to prove I'm one of the better FRLG racers there. To do that, I'll need to practice well, as I'm neither fully derusted nor planning on a hard grind for better times. In all honesty, I'm not emotionally ready to run the manipped Squirtle route, even as practice. So my practice will come in manipless runs with late Surge once I write up notes for that and Charizard attempts, because I have more fun with Charizard, and I know I can beat my time once I don't die too often. If asked like three months ago, I would have said my goal would be to win the entire tournament. Well, now, I'll say I want to do my best, get past the second round, and help make the experience as good as possible. Nothing too hard to achieve as long as I put in an honest effort, and with this plan I know I will.

I also recall my participation in the Red tournament last year, and while there were a lot of memories I did not enjoy from that, I recall what my favorite part of the tourney was. The aftermath of the Gymfreak/Xmini/Etchy race might not have been pretty, but in the moment I loved commentating for that race. And I want to continue enjoying that, so I'll probably work on commentary for speedruns in some capacity. I'll familiarize myself more with marathon runs and what people say, as well as the tech and mechanics of some Pokemon games, so that I am qualified to talk about any games whenever I get a chance. The FRLG tournament is one place that I hopefully get to exercise my commentary chops, so I'll be working on that as well, presumably offline because co-casting/restreaming speedruns isn't really a thing (and even if it were, I don't draw enough of an audience for it to be particularly fun).

Outside of FRLG, there are some runs I can envision myself doing in the near future. Over spring break I might actually install NTR for my 3DS, in which case I'll do some Moon attempts. Because it's a 5 hour game, and 3DS is about is painful to mash as it gets, there's absolutely zero chance I would ever grind that or run it with any semblance of regularity. I do not expect to join any HGSS races soon, but who knows? I might just join randomly some Saturday, so I'll just mention it here. Maybe I get to really trying in Yellow and pushing for a time I'm satisfied with, especially now that I'm seconds away from the 1:56 I said I really really wanted last month. And for my random changeup moment, a game I've been running and enjoying recently is Wii Sports Resort golf, curiously enough. I'm not particularly good, but maybe I'll pick up enough courage to actually stream an hour or so of attempts - actual attempts, not Give Up attempts. Maybe I'll do some other Wii runs as well, even though potato camming it is admittedly very awkward. I don't know.

Something that both interests me and embodies just how busy I have been is that near the beginning of February, I got the email from Twitch that I reached all the requirements for affiliate. I expect no money out of it, but I would like to fill out the forms and actually get affiliate. Says a lot that I still haven't accepted it more than a month later. The thing I am the most excited about is the ability to have my own emotes to meme with and spam! Now I have no idea what those will be or who to commission, but I can come up with my own doodles with some of the free time I don't spend speedrunning.

Full disclosure, I was thinking about how to write this for more than a couple of days now. I was so busy that I couldn't get to writing it until now, and with this delay, I've probably forgotten some things that I wanted to put in. But to sum it up, I'm gonna take it easier on myself and push myself to speedrun much less than I have in basically nine months.