Oh, am I doing this again?

It's been awhile since I've seen the post field of a Livejournal-like service. Way back when, I hopped onto LJ back when you needed invite codes or a paid account to get on. Being able to vent my thoughts in a journal was what got me through school, in all honesty. It's how I met people who later became instrumental in my life. All in all blogging was a pretty big part of my existence for many years.

I shut my LJ down in around 2010. I'd become a different person and I wanted to detach entirely from the identity that wrote those 8 years of posts. I feel that maybe that was a mistake, not because I shouldn't have detached but because journaling has a profound therapeutic and cathartic effect on my feelings and thought processes and maybe some of the harder moments of my adult life would have been easier if I had that access and feedback mechanism. I opened a personal blog hosted on my domain, but never felt right venting more personal thoughts on it because it's also the front for my more "professional" ventures.

I don't typically like providing my content to a centralized service, but I do think the nature of social blogging does have some merit, so here I am I guess. I have no idea if I'll be nearly as prolific with this as I was with my old LJ, wherein I was writing 10-20 posts a week, but we'll see.

I'm also considering spinning up a fiction serial blog. I have the actual prose all planned out, I'm just debating the best platform for it. Maybe a simulcast to Dreamwidth and a homebrew solution on my site. Nothing says I can't do both.

Alright... let's give this a try. It feels comfortable and homely already.

On speedruns, cheating, and emulators

A thing has been on my mind for a bit. Since I have this space now I figure I'll brain dump on it.

Last week, the Ninja Gaiden II leaderboard added some new rules geared toward making it harder for emulator runners to cheat. This came on the tail of a four hour long debate on what's reasonable to expect of runners, whether emulator makes it too easy to cheat, and if it's fair to expect a higher standard from emulator runners as far as proving they are legit goes. This all started when a run was submitted that the community deemed too good to be legit. The runner, when asked to prove his ability in a live stream, deleted his run and disappeared from the community.

( ...and so I ramble for 8 paragraphs about speedrun leaderboard rules )

I'm a huge proponent of reducing the amount of stuff displayed over the game. Until now I said I'd fight to the death any requirement to put something in the game window to make your run acceptable but you know what? Requiring the frame counter makes a lot of sense as far as combating TASing and splicing goes. In FCEUX and snes9x-rr it's a giant eyesore, but in Bizhawk it's a very discreet, small number in the corner of the screen. I'm all for it.

Just as long as people stop requiring capturing the window border of the emulator. I've proved that that does absolutely nothing to combat cheating.