Trysdyn Black

On being on a speedrun marathon run selection committee

2018-08-20T01:22:23Z

As part of staffing Big Bad Game-a-thon, I (among others) had the enviable and/or unenviable task of reviewing all the submissions to pick and choose what we wanted in the marathon. This was a first for me; I'd submitted runs to many marathons, but never been on the other side of the table.

At its core it's a simple task: watch over submission videos and decide if a given run would do well in the marathon or not, then review these feedback snippets and decide what gets in. Of course, the execution therein is a bit more complex: you have a limit to how much content you can fit into the marathon because most marathons have a duration decided before run selection, not a duration decided by run selection. As such, there's going to be a percentage of run-time you have to decline, and that percentage may be more than you would really want to decline.

That was the case with BBG. Submissions came in heavy at the end of our submission period and we ended up needing to decline roughly 50% of the submitted run-time. This is a pretty stark contrast from 2017, where we accepted 97%. As a result, the selection committee was forced to be pretty picky and things that would have not been looked at harshly in a marathon 5 or 10% over duration became really big deals. We declined quite a few good, solid runs unfortunately.

I think part of this is a lot of runners simply don't understand how a run selection committee thinks and does their job. I know I didn't until I actually had the task thrust onto myself. I hope to touch on some of the things I saw here and reveal some of my thought process to hopefully help other runners out.

I should note, BBG is nothing compared to GDQ, ESA, etc. We accepted half our submitted runs; events like GDQ accept less than 10%. We received about 100 hours of submissions, GDQ receives many times that. So take what I say here with a grain of salt and understanding that I'm talking about small marathons; I'm sure the process is entirely different for a GDQ.

( Our Selection Process )
( The Golden Rule for Getting In )
( The Little Details )

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Okami

2018-07-30T10:29:54Z

I streamed a blind playthrough of Ōkami last week. I'd been wanting to play it for years, but I knew it'd be an extremely special and perhaps even emotional affair, so I waited until I felt I was in a good place to commit to it. This was one of the few games I'd dread starting and then getting bored of it and leaving it unfinished. With some of the games I managed to finish on stream over the past six months, I figured now was a good time-- even if I was worried about chat spoiling things.

I'd been warned it was a long game, and I think I kind of rushed it. It weighed in at 33 hours over 7 sessions. Honestly I usually only stream 2-3 hours at a time, but this was so engaging and addictive I was doing 4, then 5, and finally 6 hour streams before the end. I'd originally bought the HD remaster on PC to play, but ran into rather severe issues with it, so I ended up emulating the PS2 version-- this was not an ideal solution but it served well enough.

I'd gone in knowing two things: 1.) That the game was strongly linked to Japanese folklore and even a bit of spirituality (a thing I have close ties to myself) and 2.) The existence of The Sun Rises, which was a song I came across years prior and felt a strong attachment to, though I didn't know anything about the context in which it was presented in the game.

( Spoilers and a LOT of rambling )

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More retro RPG rambling

2018-07-17T01:01:10Z

The other night I was musing on wanting to find a series of RPGs I hadn't discovered yet, like Deep Dungeons. I may have, kind of?

While futzing around with some old Big Blue Disk dumps, I came across Dark Designs: Grelminar's Staff. This is apparently a sort of hybrid early Ultima/Wizardry style game authored by John Carmack before he went to form Id Software.

The game is a shareware sized chunk of gameplay, as would be expected on a diskmag. The interesting thing though is there's six of them, spread out across the life of the diskmag publication. As far as I can tell three were authored directly by Carmack, and three were written by a different developer using Carmack's engine. All six together would probably combine into one fairly long gameplay experience. An Etrian Odyssey in game length maybe? (Are we measuring game length in EOs now?)

The down side is getting all six of these things running. Platform availability across the series is a little strange. Chapters 1 and 2 are available on DOS and Apple II with both e and GS versions, Chapter 3 drops the DOS support, and Chapters 4 through 6 regress to only offering the e version for Apple II support. That latter most point is a real shame too because the version tailored for the GS offered a pretty significant increase in graphical fidelity that just ceased to exist for the latter half of the series; probably due to the fact that Carmack was not part of the development of those chapters.

Having toyed with the games a bit, they're definitely a bare bones affair: an Akalabeth to the eventual Ultima that followed. Still, there's some neat little features here. You can, I believe anyway, export your party from each chapter into the next, playing the entire series with one group of adventurers. Of course, to make that work you have to make sure you have platform consistency, and for that you are essentially locked onto running an Apple IIe or Apple IIGS.

The bump in graphical fidelity for the first three games is too good to pass up; unfortunately emulating the Apple IIGS is a very sketchy affair. KEGS is your best option on a Windows system, and it's not a very friendly tool at all. At least I now know how to handle ProDOS 6? I guess that's a plus?

I may stream these some time, though I suspect their austerity would turn off viewers. There's no music, no sound, no animations. It makes Wizardry 1 for the IIe look like a modern AAA title. Still it's charming.

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It's been awhile

2018-07-12T10:33:15Z

I've been busy I suppose. I last rambled here in mid-March, when I finished my playthrough of the Deep Dungeon series. I thought then I was done with RPGs on my stream, but then I got bitten by both the Pokemon and the Etrian Odyssey bug, as well as tangoing with a little game called The Dark Spire.

I may do a write-up on those at some point but not tonight. Maybe tonight I just wanted to braindump, to catch up with the 0 people who I suspect read this. To put my thoughts in order.

Shortly after my last post, my job went rather unstable. I'd been given a temporary contract pursuant to my company being purchased by a larger entity and was rather unhappy with the culture in the new organization, so I put feelers out for other employment. I took a job closer to home, doing more engineering-related work than my old operations gig.

The job change has been a trade-off. I gave up a rather easy, boring job in a corporate culture I liked for a far more difficult, far more engaging position but within a corporate culture I dislike. It's not often I go a workday without missing the old place and my old team, but the problems I'm solving here are interesting and challenging. I can't say for sure I'm happier or not; I at least feel like I'm getting more done?

Unfortunately the new job comes with the rather steep price of my free time. At the old job I was essentially working from home almost every day, on my own schedule. That's not quite acceptable now, and I've had some difficulty transitioning back to the 9-5 world. I used to be the person available to do events, marathons, etc at any hour of the day but now I'm experiencing a time crunch trying to fit in all I used to do in fewer hours, and more constrained ones at that.

With what time I have, I've signed up to run in the Handheld Heroes marathon this coming weekend; Hachiemon is finally getting its debut in a marathon. After that, I've done the unwise thing of submitting five runs to Big Bad Game-a-thon 2018. I wrote, at length, about how awesome BBG was last year; I'm hoping it's just as great this year. Unfortunately I'm unsure if I'll be able to be present 24/7 for it this year like I was last. It's over the weekend, so maybe.

Finally, after SGDQ, I'm rather confident I want to go to AGDQ 2019. I'm so confident in this I've already started making plans-- but we'll see if I chicken out AGAIN before signup time.

Between Handheld Heroes and BBG, I want to find another obscure gem to delve into casually. I miss the experience of Deep Dungeon. Even though it was arguably quite bad, it was new and fresh to me, and was a joy to explore. Dark Spire was a joy too, and I deeply regret I can't go back and play it again from the beginning.

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My delve into Deep Dungeons

2018-03-13T12:34:43Z

As of late I've been pretty heavily into dungeon crawlers, or I guess the proper fully accurate term is "Grid based first person dungeon crawlers". You know the genre: you're dropped in a maze in first person and have to navigate your way around either with the aid of a top-down map, or by drawing your own. The big examples are Apple and MS-DOS titles such as Wizardry and Bard's Tale.

Well, there's a ton of less well-known titles for consoles. The main examples that were known in the US at least were Arcana and Shining in the Darkness (both amazing games by the way and I wholly recommend them). Popular in Japan, and never seen in the western world was the Deep Dungeon series. Over the past month I've been chipping through all four games of the series on my Twitch stream and at this point feel like I've reached the point where I almost have to ramble extensively about them.

First of all, Deep Dungeon was developed by HummingBirdSoft, a Japanese Real Estate company that branched out into video games for some strange reason. They had been developing games for three years when they made Deep Dungeon, but Deep Dungeon was their first game for the Famicom Disk System. Honestly, the game could have easily been a standard Famicom cart and probably would have fared better for it, but alas.

As far as dungeon crawlers go, Deep Dungeon is both very generic and very basic for its first two iterations: you only have one character to worry about and only battle one foe at any given time. 99% of battles involve you mashing A to attack and hoping you outlast your opponent. There's some semblance of a magic system in the form of purchasable items that are not consumed on use and can inflict damage, silence, sleep, etc. At first glance there's really not much here.

Since this is practically a novel, I'll cut each game into its own clicky link.

( Deep Dungeon I: Madou Senki )

( Deep Dungeon II: Yuushi no Monshou )

( Deep Dungeon III: Yuushi he no Tabi )

( Deep Dungeon IV: Kuro no Youjutsushi )

In total, all four games took me about 70 hours to complete. If I had to rate them in order, it would go something like IV, II, I, III, with III a significant distance behind the rest and IV a leap ahead as well. All in all they're solid games if you like dungeon crawlers. They're just not anything unique, and can suffer from shallow design and monotony until the fourth iteration.

Next I may try the Bard's Tale series...

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My week as a viral tweet superstar

2018-02-17T03:49:02Z

[Whole lot of CWs here. Slurs, trans hate, queer hate, furry hate...]

If you hang around on Twitter long enough it'll probably happen eventually: you say a thing that takes wings and the next thing you know you have to silence your phone because it's beeping every 3 seconds with RTs and replies. I guess in my case I can't be too disappointed in what did it for me. Out of all the random bad puns and random banter, what blew up for me was a rather charged tweet I made about gender identity and gamers:

Just saying: If you can memorize

- The moves of 200+ pokemon
- The moveset of every fighter in DBFZ
- The routes for speedruns
- The roles of 100+ heroes in a MOBA
- The spray patterns of guns in CS:GO
- The names and records of eSports teams

You can remember people's pronouns.

Shamefully this came from a place of anger. I've gone thus far without calling out the person in question because I believe, if they saw how big this blew up, maybe they'll give some thought to it. Suffice to say though, I was just a wee bit grumpy at a speedrunner misgendering a trans individual. This runner prides them self on being varied in the pool of games the run and routes they remember, but they claim remembering the probably ~10 people in their normal stream circles that aren't he/him is too much work.

The tweet itself was crafted to try to be more generic, hitting on something almost anyone that would self-identify as a gamer would at least understand, if not be immediately party to. My original intent was to empower people who deal with this with talking points rather than directly call anyone out. I guess you could say I was yelling into the echo chamber; something I am sometimes guilty of. What happened next though ended up educating me.

The tweet blew up. It started with a few friends Like/RTing it, then my phone was assaulted with a salvo of happy chimes indicating someone had interacted with my tweet. Within minutes I had to mute my device as friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friends were RTing multiple times a second. It was around then I knew I probably screwed up.

The most interesting thing about this is the propagation of the tweet followed very specific phases...

Phase 1 - Echo Chamber RTing: This is pretty much what I expected if things went anywhere. Friends RTing the tweet, and friends of them RTing it. The last few times I had something go "viral", it bounced around within a rather closed social group of people who shared my opinions and thoughts, so at worst I got a few people voicing their agreement or questioning some of my verbage choice. I always enjoyed when this happened because the pool of people engaging was small enough to peek at profiles and possibly find new people to follow.

Phase 2 - General Break-Out: I muted my phone and went to bed. At some point in the morning, I'm not sure when or even if there is a specific "when", the tweet reached out beyond the bubble of like-minded people I expected. Now instead of getting quiet RTs of agreement, I was seeing Quote RTs where people were inserting their own commentary, and then soon after that replies. For the most part this fell into three groups: general statements such as "I don't remember any of these things, haha", polite disagreements about the nature of gender identity, and statements that I "care too much" or whatever.

Folded into what I would consider polite discussion were a few more charged challenges. An interesting thing about the challenges in this phase of things though was most of them jumped straight to neo-pronouns, ignoring both cis women being misgendered in communities, and trans people. I assume most of these were in bad faith, regurgitating hatred and trolling. In this phase, challenges fell into one of a few groups:

Okay my pronouns are (random noun) and (other random noun), remember it or you're a nazi
Haha who cares about pronouns on the internet you loser
Trans and gender non-confirming people are mentally ill and I won't engage their delusion
Yeah but I care about pokemon/DBFZ/etc, and I don't care about identities

I think the thing of most interest here is, despite receiving about 100 of such replies, they all sorted neatly into one of these groups, while a lot of the people speaking them thought they were unique and clever, or had some insight I and others had never seen before. Most of these I ignored; a rare one or two I replied to when I saw a particular opening for a hilarious "sick burn" or whatever the kids say now and days.

Also present were the usual tired arguments of "Science says!" and whatnot. These caused arguments within the thread and linking of biased scientific journals. The usual.

One thing I could not help but notice is the more "spicy" takes seemed to come largely from individuals with anime styled avatars. Maybe that's because there's a larger ratio of them on Twitter in general, or maybe there's a correlation? I called this out to one person and they found it ironic this was coming from a furry with a furry avatar. Meh, most of the furs were on my "side" though? Such as there were sides anyway.

Mixed into this is one more thing worthy of note: individuals who felt some degree of guilt over the entire thing. This manifested in about two dozen people replying that they're trying to remember but it's actually hard sometimes. My one regret in all of this is Twitter's message length constrained exactly what I wanted to say and I didn't get a chance to express that trying is far more than most people do and mistakes can happen, so guilt shouldn't be felt from people being sincere. Oh well.

I think the highlights were the person who got so mad at my tweet that they forgot pronouns existed at all and my reply to them later. Also an individual I won't link who came at me pretty hard, but later apologized and explained to me that they, like a bunch of others, took exception to the implication that I also supported full gender non-conformity/non-binary and they felt this took a platform away from trans people. I don't agree, but I can respect the viewpoint.

Phase 3 - The Shitstorm: This persisted for about 24 hours. Then at some point the nasty stuff started. I can only presume someone with some sway or a large reader base somehow found my tweet and talked about it, because this seemed to be a very sudden and specific event in which even these somewhat thought out troll responses just turned into vitriol. I woke up the next day with about two dozen DMs from various people saying everything from "There are two genders and you are a deluded (slur)" to "I'm going to find and kill you if you don't delete your tweet". I reported the more egregious ones, of course.

Again it's worthy of note here that the people most upset about my tweet seem to have dog-whistled on the inference that I was talking about neo-pronouns (xe, ze, peh, etc, and to some degree them/they). While I certainly include that under the umbrella of "If you want to respect someone you should support their identity". this whole thing started with a woman being misgendered as a man. So a lot of the angry replies were attacking a straw man I didn't bring to the table.

In this phase, the activities from phases 1 and 2 were still present but were now taking a back seat to people bandwagoning on just insulting people in the thread. Several fights broke out between people posting low-effort insults against my furry/kin identity, against my validity as a person due to what I care about, against trans people, against GNC people, against women... and the people who wanted to defend any of the above. I mostly went silent at this point, half out of scientific curiosity for how this would play out and half due to the fact that life took my attention away from Twitter for a day or three.

Noteworthy "challenges" here...

lul sjw fur-fag
something something autism
You're such a loser if you care about people using pronouns in games
(Animated GIF of a 3D model of the number 2, presumably to argue the 'two genders' thing, but I actually don't know for sure)
Who can't keep he and she straight?? LUL
You must have no life if this is what you waste your time on (that one coming from a Twitch streamer "trying to go full time" for over a year with 4 average viewers so I'm sure they're a lovely person with many redeeming characteristics)

Highlight here? The twitter account that exists only to try to RT-and-win Funko Pops chiming into the discussion with "There are only two genders, fur-fag". I feel like I won some kind of Twitter achievement for getting called out by someone who uses their entire account trying to win 99 cent pieces of plastic, and for bonus points I'm not sure they actually read my tweet. Needless to say, upon careful consideration of their platform I found it wanting.

I made the mistake of reading those DMs yesterday as the first thing I did upon rolling out of bed. That had a momentary impact on my mood. On the plus side, I have some pretty awesome friends that reminded me how sad it is to go looking for people to insult on Twitter.

Ultimately I consider most of the "counterpoints" presented in this phase to not just be trolling, but brigading from some source. Most were not worthy of any consideration and I got to work out my pointer finger clicking "Report" quite often.

Phase 4 - Much the same as phase 1: That ended late last night. Since then I've actually been able to turn notifications back on on Twitter. The tweet, despite being almost a week old now, is getting RTs every now and then but no one's actually engaging in discussion (can you even call most of it discussion?).

Just as quickly as it arrived, my 5 or 6 days of fame/infamy vanished. The final "Score" as it were is about a quarter of a million people saw my tweet. Definitely not a massive viral explosion but hundreds of times more than I expected. Plus, it's always shocking me to how nasty some people are willing to be to absolute strangers online. However I know for a fact I changed one person's view on the gender binary, at least somewhat, so maybe that was worth it all.

I also re-learned that if you care about anything, a non-insignificant chunk of Twitter will accuse you of having autism.

I'd like to go awhile before having something blow up like that again 8)

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2017 Review

2017-12-31T13:55:31Z

2017 was pretty rough; I'm a little disappointed because I expected it to be a better year than 2016 for me. I can say for certain it wasn't, but it still had its up moments. I guess the big moments were, in no particular order:

Being unable to stream, game, or do more than browse the net for 3 months due to Comcast's tomfoolery. That seems... mostly fixed now, at least
The roommate being in and out of the ER several times over a two months period, which also seems to be cleared up now
My company being sold and leading to a 6 weeks period where I thought I was losing my job, only to be kept on; though at this point I'm unsure how long I'll stay
Staffing Big Bad Game-a-thon and getting into the BBG team and making some pretty cool friends there who I continue to interact with daily
The other roommmate moving out, leaving just the two of us in this house. This has its up sides and down sides, of course. This is the first time it's been just us, ever
Learning a TON of new speedgames: Neugier, Hop-a-bout, Hachiemon, Bao Qing Tian, Kid Niki 2, Ghostbusters 2, Rockin' Kats, Great Battle IV, Snoopy, Shining Soul II... Phew that's a lot

I don't really do resolutions, but stream/speedrun/online plans for 2018, again in no particular order...

Do better about promoting my stream, not so much because I want popularity/revenue but because a lot of people want to watch but I never tell them when I'm live
Experiment with the speedrun podcast concept I've hammered out
Pick up several games for SNES Superstars. Up to four of them are on my list right now
Kusogrande 3.0 is starting soon. I want to commentate the hell out of that, as well as compete
Finish and distribute my chat widget, now that I have affiliate I can test bits and subs more readily
Maybe this year will be the year I learn LttP? I wanted to in 2017, but the rando craze kind of soured me on the game
Get a solid plan for my book down and actually execute on it rather than waffle with yak shaving (seriously I spent 3 months writing a serial prose blog engine I never used)

Do I expect 2018 will be better than 2017? I don't know. I do expect I'll better myself, though. I'm really the only factor of the year I have control of, after all.

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Neugier and the Quest to Become the Potato

2017-12-25T18:30:32Z

I'm an odd type of speedrunner. Three to four times a year I go hunting for strange offbeat games no one has run (or usually even heard of) before, to route and showcase for major marathons.

With SNES Superstars 2018 set to be announced soon after New Year, I went looking early for my offbeat offering for next year. I found it (or one of them anyway) in Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Kodō. This game is Wolf Team all the way through: beautifully thought out and executed with the requisite amount of Wolf Team jank present in the mechanics and gameplay.

Of particular interest here is the ranking system. At the end of the game you're assigned a rank from 1 to 20, with an appropriate title attached. My first playthru got me the rank of "Normal gamer" at 14. As I began to develop a speedrun route I passed through "Masterful Player" at rank 8, then "Beyond Champion" at 4, "Over the Top" at 3, and finally "King of Kings" at 2. Quite the superlative! However rank 1 eluded me. At this point I was completing the game in 20 minutes, down from 2 hours for the rank 14 play.

I did some research and found from game's one FAQ and its translation patch notes that rank seems to be based purely on in-game time and that rank 1 was translated in the English patch to be "Couch Potato". I was now playing on the Japanese version though (as I was doing proper speedruns), so I wanted to see what the title for rank 1 was in the Japanese version. I set out on a stream with the explicit purpose of getting Rank 1, calling it "The quest to become the potato".

It turned out to be a five hour stream as I honed my route and shaved off seconds. About ten attempts in I cut the 20:00 mark, which I thought for sure would give me the desired result. To my dismay I was once again assigned the rank of "Rank 02: King of Kings". Okay fine! At that point I knew ranks 2, 3, and 4 were on one minute increments: sub 21, sub 22, and sub 23 respectively but apparently the illustrious Potato title requires yet more. Back to the grind!

Finally while practicing the Stage 4 boss, I discovered a strategy that cut an entire cycle off the fight. I cut 27 seconds off my personal best and sat with bated breath as the credits scrolled. My chat intoned "Time for potato?!" as the azure cloud-textured text scrolled by and then, there it was...

  PLAY TIME
  00:18:50

   YOU ARE
GOKUTSUBUSHI
   RANK 01

Chat exploded. One of the viewers volunteered the translation: layabout, good-for-nothing, deadbeat... Yeah okay, Couch Potato is a good translation for this. A bit kinder maybe. In the afterglow as I tore down stream and cut the video of the run a thought occurred. While I don't consider this to be an optimized play at all, it seems to me they calibrated the ranking system to align almost perfectly with a good speedrun of the game.

I direly want to know the story behind this. Did someone at Wolf Team speedrun the game? Did they sit around on lunch break trying to finish an alpha of it the fastest and then calibrated rank 1 for whoever did so? More importantly, has anyone gotten rank 1 in this before? I peeked around and couldn't find much, but I also acknowledge that I really can't search, for example, Nicovideo well because of language barriers.

In any case, sub-18 in-game time is possible, and I'm curious if it's going to wrap back around to the special rank of Rank 21: Cheater if I do it.

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TG-16 History and Speedrunning Rambling No One Wanted To Hear!

2017-12-09T15:02:38Z

I speedrun a lot of strange things. Among those things is a pair of TG-16 games. TG-16/PCE speedrunning is a pretty niche thing with only a handful of people actively doing it, and most of them on emulator (myself included). As such, information is kind of short, which is why it's neat when I learn something new.

In this case the education came in the form of discovering a new glitch in Dragon Egg. Specifically, properly jumping and starting a hold of turbo button 1 can allow you to hover infinitely, letting you fly through an autoscroller and skip several tricky jumps. I figured I'd discovered something that'd cut a ton of time off the run, since after all turbo is allowed in TG-16 speedrunning since turbo was a feature of pack-in controllers.

Fortunately I know someone who has Dragon Egg on native hardware and they attempted to replicate my findings without success. Unsure if I'd discovered an emulator only glitch or what, we did some testing across multiple emulators, but the solution was much simpler than anything like that. After scratching our heads one of my viewers pointed out something I should have considered sooner: maybe it comes down to turbo timing and implementation?

Until then I'd just assumed turbo controllers universally just slammed the input as fast as it can. Usually that's 30hz. Why 30? Because most consoles poll input at 60hz, and you have to have one poll "on" and one poll "off" each press of the button, so 30 presses per second. Not so with the TG-16. The pack-in controller does indeed poll at 60hz, but the turbo utilizes one of two frequencies, controlled by a switch: 15hz (1 on, 3 off) or 7.5hz (4 on, 4 off). Since the reference implementation has a cap of 15hz, most other pads just stuck with that, so games really aren't designed to handle 30hz like that.

Emulators, of course, don't care about that. Bizhawk by default uses 30hz but fortunately you can specify frequencies, so once I turned my turbo down to 15hz, I too stopped being able to infinite hover.

Using the "illegal" infinite hover could cut about 45-60 seconds off the run, but it'd be unfair since console players couldn't replicate it, so what do? I ended up updating the rules on the Dragon Egg leaderboard to note "Turbo on emulator is discouraged". Outright banning it isn't fair either, though I know that if someone posts a run utilizing infinite hover, their turbo settings are wrong and the run isn't valid for comparing to console runs.

I doubt anyone's going to do that. To date there's been four runners of the game in 2+ years. I just found the whole thing interesting.

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Braindumping Stresses from the Past Month

2017-11-23T10:42:11Z

Most people who would read this follow me on Twitter so they probably know how things went with the job. I haven't really had the time or inclination to write anything; it's been a stressful month. Let's see...

On the the job front, I was shockingly retained. I'm on a temporary contract to migrate our environment to the buying company's servers, then it's "expected" I find a role within the company to migrate into. I haven't decided how seriously I'll pursue that; first thing's first anyway. The last business day I'm an employee of the old company is probably Monday. We lost our tier 1 guys and our manager. So now there's no one insulating the system engineers from users and veeps, we're having trouble prioritizing or sticking to one task because no one's triaging for us or setting priorities. It's going to be fun when migration work begins.

On the home front, the partner-thing had a major medical issue mid-August and was put on a medication that made him ill for three months. So about once a week for three months we were going to the walk-in clinic or, in some cases, the ER. That seems to be settling now but I'm still in this hyper vigilant state where I feel like I can't fully relax because he may have another issue resulting in an urgent trip to a doctor. I'm sure I'll unwind in time but for now it's a rather intrusive thought constantly on my mind. He's off the meds now and improved almost immediately so... yeah hopefully it's over. Achievement unlocked: hit your yearly out of pocket maximum on your insurance? Blorf.

Furthermore our other roommate, who moved out in March to live with her wife, experienced a run of bad luck and the two of them may or may not be moving back in in trade for maid work. Don't know yet. Not looking forward to four people in this small house but it would be nice to have another presence here again. The house is oddly quiet with only the two of us here. I'm thankful to be in a position where I can actually help people in such a way. It wouldn't have been the case if the two of us had lost our jobs suddenly with all the medical issues hovering around.

Then I found out yesterday one of the big names in the retro speedrunning scene may have some kind of major health issue leading them to believe they'll be passing on soon. Details are sketchy but there's enough there to piece together a story that he's not expecting to survive out the year. That was a punch in the gut seeing as how much I like the guy. Death and I don't get along... Understatement of the century, yeah?

SPEAKING OF... it's my birthday in less than a week. I've largely not been a fan of celebrating it because it's also the anniversary of the death of one of my SOs. It's been 8 years now but it still twinges the back of my mind when the day rolls around. Especially when so much illness is surrounding me like this year. Still, I'd like to do something. For the past 8 years it's just been "just another day". Sadly on my birthday itself I'll be in meetings planning the migration of work's systems to the new overlords. I don't even get to take the day off as I've traditionally done every year.

Then you have all the political stuff going on, and whatnot. Yeah... it's been a really rough late half of 2017 for me.

I dunno, I just wanted to hash all this out for people asking what's been eating at me lately. The answer is a whole hell of a lot.

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Unexpected Last-Minute Bonds

2017-10-18T09:07:36Z

There's another meeting tomorrow. I don't expect cuts to start yet. There's a lot of legal red tape that has to happen first. Still, it's none too pleasant a situation. On top of that, my roommate/partner/etc has been having medical issues. Nothing extreme, but we've had to dip into the urgent care a few times over the past month and boy am I looking forward to losing our insurance...

Those of us that bonded at this company ran off and formed a chat room elsewhere so we could keep in touch if the axe falls suddenly. Today the topic of that chat somehow turned to me and my presentation. A few times through my tenure here I dropped my enby presentation and went in full femme. Nothing extreme, usually my tank-top blouse, frilled jacket, and a skirt. I usually did this as dire stress relief as I found it oddly comforting to dress in sharp contrast to societal expectation. Fortunately it never got bad enough that I felt the need to start wearing my PVC stuff... eh heh.

In any case, in a more frank and open environment my coworker-friends expressed some interesting thoughts on it. A strange conversation ensued about a male coworker finding my femme presentation cute, which led to the comment "I AM straight but you're not a dude so..." I found the whole thing almost comforting in a strange way, though I'm sure it was awkward as hell for him. I'd quipped many times that my goal was to cause that confusion about gender roles but at the same time, I'm not a fan of causing discomfort. This was all in good fun though :)

I'm unsure what I'll do if I have to restart with a new company. Showing up on day one in a mode enby enough to be obvious would set an expectation, and this IS still Silicon Valley where these kinds of shenanigans are expected. At the same time, my MO tends to be to establish competency BEFORE becoming "That insane sysadmin everyone puts up with" -- Then again, maybe enby could be a baseline and the "Eccentric sysadmin" push could be the more fun things I want to start weaving into my public presentation. Hmm.

I guess I'll have to feel that out as I go. Besides, I'm not fired from this job yet.

On another note, it's 2am and I'm only just now getting tired. Good. I've been having sleep schedule problems for weeks. This is about where I want to be.

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Job Stuff

2017-10-12T16:30:55Z

Yesterday I was stirred awake at 4:30am by a noise or something. While I was settling back into bed I decided to peek at my phone. I had a message from my CEO explaining in very curt and sterile form letter terms that my company has been bought out and there was a mandatory attendance all hands meeting at start of business. Not the best way to wake up after ~4 hours of sleep.

My partner and I were both awake so we drove into the office and just had "our day" early, then sat down for this meeting. Here's where the details have to be hazy but the net of it is yes, my company is being acquired by a larger firm. They were very careful to give absolutely no useful information at this point, as one can expect. What I gleaned from it, though, is that in about 30 days I will probably be layed off.

Everyone involved is playing their cards close to their chest. Why let people know they'll be let go in a month? They'll lame duck it. However given that I tend to be the generalist on the team with not as much under my wing that's mission critical, I expect I'm one of the least important people in my group. So yeah, I'm working on the assumption that either mid-November, or end of year, I'll be axed.

One bright side to this: due to a combination of factors, I'll be "okay" financially if it happens. The down side? I like this job. I'm actually completely 100% out about who I am there, which is something I can't say for sure I'll ever be able to do again. It's kind of a scary thing that after years of not having to live a double life, I'll probably have to go back to that to get in somewhere else. I've been extremely lucky.

To double that "I like this job" thing, most people in speedrunning scenes know me as the person who has an amazingly flexible schedule and can be involved in events whenever. I do night shifts for marathons, can fill in runs at events in the middle of the night or dawn, I'm always around. This is entirely because of the flexibility of my job and I'm not certain I can go back to a standard 9-5 now; especially with my sleep disorder in play.

I mean yeah, that's all whining. Having to go back to "A normal job" is a pretty good problem to have. It's hitting me kind of hard right now though. Who knows though, maybe they'll keep the whole team. I don't have a ton of hope for this being a permanent arrangement as it's been for the past years though.

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Waxing Nostalgic

2017-10-08T09:07:19Z

Dating myself here, but my after-school life through middle to high school consisted of mostly four things: AIM, Quake, Graal, and writing.

This week AIM announced it is shutting down. I haven't used or even looked at AIM for about 5 years but it's still one of those sobering reminders that a lot of the mainstays that formed my developmental life are either gone or changed. I peeked in at AIM and my buddy list was empty; I presume everyone on it hasn't logged in in about as many years as I have not. It's also... sobering... how many people there are that moved on with their lives and lost contact and I'll probably never see them again.

While kicking around news articles about the AIM shutdown, I found one interesting description of the service: "A secular confession box for 90s and 00s teens" and... yeah, definitely. In a way this is where the mentality of freedom from consequences online started. You could hit someone up and talk to them, say anything, and once you logged off you were nobody to them. You'd talk to strangers about your life, your day, who you loved, who you hated. You'd give advice, get advice; these people would change how you felt and how you lived but at the end of the day beyond the screenname you rarely knew who they were. The generation of adults today were raised on the lack of permanence presence then.

In the waning years of AIM, the MO of messaging and chat changed a bit. Instead of 1 on 1 conversations leading to group chats, we moved toward broadcasting sometimes leading into 1 on 1, but often not. Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Telegram... they all kind of lead more to just blatting your thoughts out into the ether and seeing who replies; but more often than not no one does. I think it's kind of sad; but then again I was one of those people who, in the absence of Twitter, just pinned someone down on AIM and said what I woulda tweeted anyway.

I don't know, maybe I'm just being an old coot and sitting here in nostalgia but really: so much of my personal development happened in red-on-black in an AIM window. I don't know for sure if we're better or worse off for that method of conversation being gone, but I feel an order of abstraction more disconnected from current society in its departure.

As for Graal, that's still around but not in the way it was when I was there. I should talk about that sometime.

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Maybe I'll Actually Do Nanowrimo This Year

2017-09-30T10:25:30Z

It's 3:15. I'm trying to get my brain to wind down enough to sleep so my schedule doesn't drift too far out of control by having my LEDs on their lowest red setting. These things cast a dim enough glow to just barely see by; I suppose it looks like an old photography lab in here like this.

On my mind is the coming Nanowrimo. I've had a novel ... mostly... outlined in my head for years now. Probably more like a trilogy, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Will I do it this year? Who knows. I actually want to start sooner than November, and eschew the Nano concept entirely. I don't think I could hammer this whole thing out in one month anyway.

As far as the novel goes, it's actually a story world that's a fusion of five short stories I wrote since middle school. Some of them were pretty bad, and will need a total rehash, but I've developed as a wordsmith since those days, so I think the challenge is more fitting them together cleanly. Initially, those five stories weren't intended to be within the same universe; it was only many years later did I realize how well they could coexist.

The general plan is to get about a quarter of the story done, then begin publishing it chapter by chapter as a web serial. I already have the platform for that developed (both a journal here on Dreamwidth and a custom script I wrote to publish to my own website too). I have at least the first quarter of the story outlined in explicit detail. I guess I just need to start.

But hasn't that always been the barrier?

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On Speedrunner Personality Types

2017-09-21T15:38:44Z

This is something I've been kicking around in my head for awhile and I think it's matured enough to finally post it.

( Prelude: Some math stuff I'm cutting to make this SLIGHTLY less huge )

Using this, I've hammered out four different personality types of speedrunner. Now, this isn't a hard and fast delineation just like the MBTI isn't a hard and fast delineation; some people are multiple types, some are situational, some are none of the above.

Also worthy of note: most everyone of all types can agree speedrunning (and gaming in general) is fun. Isn't that why we're all here? ;)

Type 1 is what I call the "Game/Series fan", these folks are fans of a game or series first and a speedrunner second. They're usually the ones who, when asked "Why do you speedrun?", say things like "I liked the game and wanted an excuse to play more of it". They usually focus on one game or a series, but often run it "their way" and may choose to not use optimal routes or strategies, so their times can be all over the leaderboard; but that's okay because they often don't care about leaderboards. Those that do care about leaderboards often want to dominate the entire series they run. Examples that come to mind for me: werster, DarkspinesSonic, kmac, Big Jon.

Type 2 are what I call "Starters" or "Experimental runners". These are folks who love finding new speedgames, routing them, and getting a good run out there for people to see before moving on. They often pick up a new speedgame on a whim, have dozens (or sometimes hundreds) of games they've run, and will randomly see a game for the first time and decide they want to run it. They live in the first section or two of the graph above and often are seen running really obscure titles that have never been routed before. Examples: authorblues, garbanzcurity, Trysdyn (Yes that's a shameless self-promo).

Type 3 are "Competition runners", or "Grinders", or "What most people consider to be a normal speedrunner". These are the folks who have a small cluster of games they run and they want to run them as well as they can. They usually care the most about position on the leaderboard, aiming to "bop" other runners and foster friendly competition. They live in the first three sections of the graph, usually focusing on one game until they either have the World Record, or meet a goal they set for them self (and it's usually a decently lofty one). While Type 2's may focus on a game for 1-2 weeks at a time, Type 3's focus on one for 1-2 (or more) months at a time. They run one game long enough to have a reputation for being "That guy who runs that game", while sometimes having smaller side-flings. Examples: Toad, Klaige, Skavenger216.

Finally Type 4, which may be an extension of Type 3, are the extreme grinders. These are runners who run one game, are typecast as running that game, and aim to push past World Record and into lowering the run time as much as they possibly can. They may pick one game and run it for months or years, while seldom looking into another project. Usually it's a game they love, so if they reach their goal with the game, they'll fall back to another type, or stop speedrunning altogether. Examples: darbian, FuriousPaul, Zoast, Arcus (formerly with Ninja Gaiden).

So I guess really the simplistic view is "How much do you want to grind". Really though I've noticed a major MO difference between the types, on top of just their dedication to a specific game. As examples: Type 1's love Sonic/Pokemon/Castlevania/etc, Type 2's love routing random games and experiencing new things, Type 3's want to be the best at their game, and Type 4's want to push themselves and their game to the limit. How much they grind is a product of the MO, not the other way around.

So what productive use does this type inventory have? None really. I just found it interesting to ponder on. Running around typing runners is probably not productive in the least, but it does shine a light on how the hows and whys of speedrunning change so drastically depending on who you talk to. We all do it for different reasons.

I'm definitely a habitual Type 2, myself. ;)

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Big Bad Game-a-thon

2017-09-18T03:05:04Z

I just finished staffing a speedrun marathon all weekend. Big Bad Game-a-thon was a neat idea people in the Kusogrande bad game tournament had to put on a marathon exclusively of speedruns and challenge plays of bad games. It was far more successful than we could have possibly dreamed.

A lot of people submitted runs, even people outside the niche of "Bad game" fans that we expected. We ever had some people who knew so many arguably poor quality games that we had to limit the number of submissions we allowed from one person. We managed to fill a 60 hour schedule with runs and have several backup runs on the side; that alone was a shock. Still as we put the word out we expected maybe 50 viewers at peak, nothing huge. Who wanted to see a marathon that intentionally ran bad games after all?

I'd been saddled with graveyard shift for emceeing. My original workload was supposed to be two four hour shifts of being on mic at about 3am local time. I work my own hours and have sleep issues anyway, so I volunteered for the grunt shifts. As the marathon started, though, we realized this was going to be a bigger deal than we thought. We had 200 viewers right from the word go, with the number steadily increasing as the event went on. Whew!

I ended up doing a little of everything: emceeing, chat modding, supporting runner setup, cutting highlights. Then some technical problems arose and I ended up developing some scripts to circumvent them. On top of all of that, I had one scheduled run in the marathon, and when we got so far ahead of schedule we needed to go to bonus runs, I had a second I was unprepared for put in (but it went fine~). In the end I was emcee, chat mod, highlight cutter, coder, technical support, runner setup, and a little bit of administration as the only awake staff member at 3am.

It was a blast. My first emcee shift, I was tense because the bot we had been using to control the marathon was having technical problems and the only person able to reboot it was asleep, but we were able to isolate the cause of the issue and some Twitch API scripting on my part made sure it never happened again; I'm proud of myself for that one. I'm not going to say I "Saved the marathon" or anything, but I'll take some credit for making things run smoothly. The staff even took time to thank me in the finale for my work, so that felt nice.

Downside: I'm tired as hell. I slept maybe 6 hours all weekend, grabbing a few naps during longer runs I found less interesting. I'm going to sleep like a rock when I finally calm down enough to crash.

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My Ill-Fated Journey with Comcast Support

2017-09-02T23:52:20Z

August was a bad month. Getting into the complete picture of why is far beyond the scope of one post, so I'm going to focus on the issue most visible to people following me in the internet spaces: my issues with Comcast and my internet service. This is long so I've chunked it into chapters to not flood timelines.

( 10 Aug: The Beginning )

( 14 Aug: The Initial Support Request )

( 18 Aug: Tier 1 Hell )

( 21 Aug: Tech Visit #2 )

( 22 Aug: A Glimmer of Hope? )

( 27 Aug: Ghosted by Comcast Support )

( 2 Sep: Escalation #4 )

( 5 Sep: Improvement! )

( 10 Sep: Resolution )

( 23 Sep: Recurrence )

( 29 Sep: First Major Issues )

( 3 Oct: Service Unusable )

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In Which I Complain For 2551 Words About FF4: The After Years

2017-08-14T02:38:32Z

As part of my streaming project I played through Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. I'd been wanting to play this for awhile, despite hearing all sorts of warnings that it wasn't very good. I dove in blind and managed to play… most of the game without any sort of major assistance. Now that I'm on the other side (32 hours later, twice as long as every other FF I played for this event except for FF3), I can say that all the criticism is valid and warranted.

For those who don't know, FFIV:TAY is essentially FFIV-2. It takes place seventeen years after the events of FFIV and focuses on the son of Cecil and Rosa initially before branching out to the other FFIV characters and their families and friends. The initial release of TAY was episodic, and on mobile devices. It came out across most of 2008 in the form of a new "Tale" being released every few weeks as a separate purchase. The game was later released on the Wii and PSP. From what I hear, the PSP version is probably the best one if you're okay with the altered graphics.

So what's the problem with TAY? I suspect it's largely the original format. Episodic and mobile doesn't make for a solid RPG experience. Anyway let's break down what got my goat here.

First of all the game is extremely linear. In each Tale you are shepherded from place to place by the plot and conveniently placed guards and barriers. Once a Tale ends, you are kicked back to the main menu to begin a new Tale, and cannot access that content again unless you load a save inside that Tale and re-do it. For the first fifteen hours of play I can count two instances of having any real choice in where to go.

Due to the episodic format, most Tales end in a cliffhanger and nothing ever gets resolved until the very end. This would be vexing enough on its own, but most of the cliffhangers are produced in the form of a borderline fourth wall breaking insult to the cast and even the player. The end of most of the Tales involves a conversation that goes something like "What is your plan with the crystals?" "I don't have to tell you", fade to black. No, I'm not paraphrasing. "I don't have to tell you" and permutations thereof is the most common line uttered by the new mysterious antagonist. How much TAY teases you with the potential of new plot reveals only to have this antagonist and her block-of-wood personality slap it away while laughing at you is maddening. This is not how you create dramatic tension.

As an extension of the biffed attempts at dramatic tension, the writing is terrible. Most of the cast act completely inappropriate for their characters. Sure, it's been seventeen years since FFIV, but in that time I don't think Cecil would suddenly become susceptible to his dark side again, or Rosa would literally lose all personality. It just all felt wrong. Surprise twists are also telegraphed so hard I'm unsure their reveals were supposed to be surprises at all. It's all very hamfisted.

Also due to the episodic nature, you're forced to traverse the level 10 to 25 expanse a dozen times. Each time you get a character up to a level that they feel reasonably powerful, the Tale ends and you're forced to start a new Tale with a new cast of level 10s. It gets very grating to not ever get to feel powerful unless the plot dictates it.

Speaking of which, in each Tale you will be in at least two battles that are forced losses. Some of these are just mind numbing… Battles you could win that are forced losses by plot, enemies suddenly pulling out abilities they shouldn't have. Eventually the game just gives up and makes the "You lose now" attack KO the party without even doing damage. At least twice I ended up in fights I thought would be yet another forced loss, only to game over because it wasn't. You've messed up your writing when that happens.

Finally on the writing front, about half the Tales just feel completely pointless and irrelevant. Porom's Tale is all flashbacks to when Palom and Porom were kids. Edward's Tale is nothing but traversing the Underground Waterway three(!!!) times. Edge's Tale is 80% about four comedy relief ninjas you'll never in your right mind use again. Yang's Tale tells the amazingly coherent story of Yang and his daughter having to traverse a dungeon to find fuel for their sailing ship-- If you think you misread that, you didn't. It's that stupid.

So okay, the writing and the pacing are terrible. That's all, right? Nope. If that was all, I think I would have found it to be a semi-enjoyable one-time experience just out of my love for Final Fantasy IV. Once you reach "The Gathering", which imports all your progress in the Tales into a combined story line that runs to the end of the game, the game throws you up against a brick wall.

See, I've mentioned TAY was initially episodic a few times now. Part of this is the inclusion of a "Challenge Dungeon" in each Tale. The intent was to provide the player with something to hold their interest between Tales, but in the combined release ten years after the episodic trickle of content, there's no point to explore them. Each CD provided no plot information or progress, and the loot you get would quickly be outclassed the next time you have access to those characters. To finish a CD, you usually need to be close to 40. It's a grindy time sink. I skipped them.

The Gathering and Finale seem to assume you've done them. The Gathering is just that: you're given a party of four people dictated by plot (Edge, Rydia, Luca, and Golbez if you're curious) and must go find the rest of the cast (and other stuff) to prepare for the Finale. If you begin this Tale with your party in the 20-25 range, you'll get pasted by practically every battle laid out in front of you. Also, every cast member you rescue has some plot reason for being unable to assist you; you never even fill your empty fifth slot. Everyone you pick up just sleeps on the airship until the end of The Gathering. So you're stuck with this party whether you leveled them, want to use them, or neither.

After The Gathering, you pass a point of no return and are given access to your whole cast. You can assemble any party of five you want, finally! Hooray! At this point I was sixteen hours (over many days) in and had forgotten the capabilities, equipment, and whatnot of most of my cast. Though I already had a party in mind I wanted to use. In any case, you're placed at the top of a fifty(!!!) floor dungeon for this. Elevators are spaced every five or so floors, allowing you to return to the ship and restock and rearrange your party. So really it's closer to ten five-floor dungeons.

This is where the difficulty curves really slap you in the face. Most of your cast, you left at the end of their Tale at level 20-25, probably didn't do their CD, and probably didn't use them in The Gathering unless you got lucky with your planned party versus plot requirements. Once you set foot in the final dungeon, the expectation is you're around level 40. I was 20-35 depending on character, so the very first boss in Floor 2 (of 50) just utterly wrecked me. It's here I got so tired of the game and progression that I stopped and grinded for three hours on floor 1 of the dungeon, reaching level 45 on my entire party. This would turn out to be exactly sufficient to finish the game.

The moral of this story? If you don't do the CDs, expect to need to grind several hours in the same one tiny room of the final dungeon to get your party viable. That's not all though. In three specific instances in the final dungeon you will need a specific party. One of these is a big side-plot climax, in which four of your party slots are decided for you. I had to grind a second time because two of these mandatory members were still level 20. That grind was only an hour, though.

So what is the final dungeon? What is in there that's so massive that it needs to be a fifty floor marathon? Probably the worst plot twist in all of Final Fantasy. See, it's revealed to you (spoilers coming) that the crystals in not just the FFIV world, but every classic FF, were placed there by the same singular progenitor who is now coming to reclaim them and destroy any world that has not evolved enough for his experiments. As a result, the final dungeon contains the canonical crystals from FFI through FFVI, and each crystal is guarded by a throwback boss. You fight the four fiends from FFI, the four dark crystal bosses from FFIII, bosses from FFIV you haven't encountered yet in the Tales, and bosses from FFV and VI including Gilgamesh and Doomtrain. It's…. really, really stupid and there's no good reason for it aside from "HEY REMEMBER THIS?!" They even had a chance to make Ultros and Gilgamesh hilarious, and their writers just dropped the ball. It was so disappointing.

Really I consider it a cardinal sin to try to link FFs together like this in fan fiction, let alone an official FF title…

So, thirty hour mark. I've suffered through completely pointless Tales, having my progress reset to level 10 each Tale transition, awful writing, five hours of forced grind because of difficulty curve whackery and forced party changes. I'm five floors from the finale. What's left? Two of the biggest, pointless DPS check bosses I've ever seen.

Once you reach the FFVI floor, you're in the home stretch. Here though lies the most sudden, sharp, jilting difficulty jump known to man. I was level 60 at this point, having started at floor 1 at 45 and just not really run from much as I progressed. I was gaining maybe one level per section; the experience curve had turned into a wall. I was clearly not intended to level much more than this. I expected most of the final fights would be easy, and they were until here. Enter Ultima Weapon.

Ultima Weapon is a mandatory, progress blocking boss that fights like a superboss. He has two abilities that can instantly kill any member of the party, Meteor, physicals that hit for 4,000 damage, and a Bahamut-like countdown mechanic that ends in a 5,000 damage to all megaflare. At this point, with my "endgame ready" party, my beefiest character had 4,700 HP. Megaflare is a wipe, and he can begin the charge to cast it at will. I was unable to knock him down before he cast it, and only by the good grace of Edward having Hide did I not totally wipe. It was a 20 minute battle on its own. I've killed Omega in FFV faster than that! For those curious, the boss prior to him is Doomtrain, whom I clowned in two minutes with Flares from Palom. What a difficulty spike!

Just after you managed to scrape by Ultima Weapon, the game has one more middle finger for you: a battle with Bahamut and the mysterious antagonist. Rydia is required to be in your party for this; even at level 60 she won't survive what either of them dish out; so she's a dead party slot. You also almost have to do this fight on a moon with Black Magic down, so she's doubly useless.

So how's this fight go? The antagonist is invincible and immune to all status effects. Bahamut does what he does: a 5 count before casting Megaflare and wiping you. This is a DPS race. Reflect? Nope, in this reiteration of the fight, the antagonist will cast Black Hole just before Megaflare, the two coming out as a single move. Once the clock hits 0 you're dead. So you have to win this DPS race with four party members, while the invincible antagonist is throwing Tornado, Quake, Slow, Confuse, and Meteor at you. Good hecking luck.

This all happens five floors above the bottom. The next five floors are total filler, feeling like dummied or prototype content. You walk through winding halls of a new tileset, where there are no random encounters, no loot, nothing. This could have been a single straight hallway and been just fine. Though there is a purpose for this that comes later, I guess. In any case my point is this: after coming off the high of beating Bahamut, you're forced to cool down with five floors of nothing, not even music. It really ruins the hype for what's coming-- though the final boss would ruin the hype anyway.

The final boss is introduced as a sudden new foe much like Zemus in FFIV. He has no real backstory, he's only mentioned in side-discussions with who you thought was the main villain until now. He even has the same "use the crystal to begin the fight" gimmick Zeromus did. There's nothing to say. He's also weaker than Ultima Weapon in every way. It's really a disappointment after barely scraping by Bahamut and Ultima Weapon.

So it's over when you beat him, yeah? No. As the dungeon begins to collapse (because why not make him a load bearing boss) you're forced to flee back through the five floors of nothing you descended, with the boss chasing you. At the end of each "battle", plot happens to tie up some loose ends. The writing is terrible, the design is terrible. I think the apex of bad framing here is when one of the plot characters tries to help you by casting Protect on you just before you're forced by the game to flee the battle. Thanks? You can't lose these fights, they're just excuses to let the former antagonist "save" you by sacrificing itself.

The denouncement cutscene is twenty minutes of nothing. Most of it is framed around the four ninjas you don't care about. One funny point though is you're forced into a mock training battle between Cecil and his son and, if you're like me and unequipped everyone you weren't using, they're just punching each other until the game cuts the scene ten turns later. I'm pretty sure that's supposed to go faster than that! Even the closing cutscene has bad story/engine framing.

A long story short: there's a reason why people say TAY is miss-able, even for people who really love the FFIV canon. It's not worth playing even then because the game actively tries to ruin what you'd love about the original FFIV by forcing you to revisit dungeons, bosses, and then caps it off with a plot reveal that basically invalidated FFIV's entire story. I'm glad I played it, but I don't plan to ever touch it again or recommend anyone else do the same.

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My Splits Aren't Green

2017-07-17T23:58:45Z

Awhile back I changed the colors I use in my speedrun timer. I kind of quickly glossed over how it was for accessibility and to let colorblind individuals be able to more easily tell the difference between splits. After witnessing and being involved in a discussion with some other speedrunners on the topic I thought I'd expand a bit.

( Background: What a speedrun timer is, what splits are, etc )

The problem is the colors used by default in speedrun timers aren't very distinguishable for people with certain types of colorblindness. An alternate color set has been floating around the scene for awhile, most recently improved by HalfCoordinated. You can see a showcase of it on his Twitter here. This palette moves 'good' and 'bad' splits further apart on the spectrum to increase hue differentiation, and make it easier for a colorblind person to tell them apart. It also utilizes a feature of LiveSplit to make 'gold' splits appear in a transitioning rainbow.

I took this a step further and proposed adding this more accessible palette to the default layout list in LiveSplit. This was an operation I thought would manifest as a simple pull request to the project's GitHub page, but the developers chimed in with some ideas to even further expand the concept, and this is where the discussion started.

As I said, green, red, and gold is pretty deeply embedded in the community. So embedded, actually, that some people dislike the more accessible palette out of concern that it causes confusion for people who aren't "with it" enough to recognize what the new hues mean. Other criticisms include that colorblind people are used to it already, that colorblind people can use other data in the timer to differentiate (such as the actual split time), and that adding another feature to timers just for the sake of a small audience isn't worth the effort and code bloat.

I'm not here to argue by proxy with these objections, I merely list them to outline my next point: that these objections are exactly why I want the more accessible palette to grow in adoption. Arguably it's NOT a "big deal", colorblind people CAN use additional data to figure out what's going on, and it MAY cause confusion, but all of these concerns are transitional. For me this isn't only about suddenly breaking down a barrier that prevents colorblind people from getting involved in a good run (though it will help!); it's about bringing an issue to the forefront that most people don't think about.

When I changed my split colors to something close to HC's palette above, I got a lot of questions about why from people who had never considered the default was impossible for some people to differentiate. It sparked discussion and thought. This small change, which ultimately only made a small difference to 1 or 2 of my viewers, made 4 or 5 of them think more about accessibility for a moment. Maybe one of them walked away with the understanding that green/red is sub-optimal for accessibility, and will remember that the next time they design something.

It's just colors, and it's just redundant data that can be sussed out via other means if you can't differentiate the hues, and all my viewers understand how my splits work with or without colors, but it's something I have control over that could make more abled people think a little bit more about disability. I guess that's the big deal for me.

That's why I want to see it become the default for more streamers.

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Bewilderment, and some stream project stuff

2017-07-11T01:09:58Z

( Pointless Mastodon stuff )

That all out of the way, stream stuff I have coming down the pipe... I'm running in Handheld Heroes on Friday. I feel ready for my Rolan's Curse II run, but Dicing Knight is RNG incarnate and the game itself could just decide I will not finish my run. I'm trying to make peace with the fact that I may have my first ever mercy-kill in a speedrunning marathon, but really I'm also practicing backup strats as hard as I can. Nervous, just the same.

After that, I'm going to start a personal streaming project, to break up the monotony of speedruns and such. After all my Four Job Fiesta runs, of which I did four this year, I've had an itch to go back and play other Final Fantasy titles I have in the past, and visit ones I never finished. When I made a list of what I wanted to stream, it basically included every pre-Playstation title, with the exception of 2. So I decided to just stream all of them: 1-6, Mystic Quest, and why not throw in the extended IV gaidens and Tactics.

That's going to be a long project but I don't have to stick to it every stream. I can weave speedrun streams and other stuff between chipping away at it. Besides, it gives me an excuse to code yet another weird stream overlay widget: a custom timer for it. I mean, I won't really need a speedrun timer, but I do want to track how long the journey takes.

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The Great OStatus Experiment, Concluded

2017-06-30T05:51:31Z

I've been doing experiments into Mastodon and GNU Social for about two months now, with my own GS instance running for about two weeks. In that time I've become pretty familiar with the OStatus protocol that powers both, the differences between the two, how they inter-operate, and the political issues that both led to the division, and continue to spark contention between the loyalists to the two. Sadly, I made the decision today to close my GNU Social node and instead do my microblogging on a Mastodon server a friend owns. I think it important to share why for people confused about the state of the "Fediverse" in the future.

( A bunch of history )

What does this mean for a user/admin?

This is the important part. If you're thinking of either hosting or using an OStatus-powered service and federating, there's some decisions to make that aren't as obvious as technology choice. Also some things to be aware of:

First, whether you use GNU Social or Mastodon, some instances will refuse to federate with you. You won't be able to interact with people on those instances. The reasons for this are wide and varied and I don't feel this is the place to discuss their merit. Just be aware that's a thing. With the boiling political climate and coming changes in Mastodon 1.5, I expect this divide will only grow. If you absolutely have to reach someone on an instance that refuses to federate with Mastodon, you'll have to use GNU Social and vice versa.

Second, if you choose to host or use a GNU Social instance, you will already be missing several features that let you see the posts from Mastodon users as they were intended to be seen. Due to this missing context, you may chime into threads you're not supposed to, see images that you may not want to because their content warnings have been stripped, and miss parts of messages because they were part of OStatus tags GNU Social just ignores. This feature gap will, again, only grow with time.

Third, by the same token, Mastodon users should be painfully aware that the privacy features are merely suggestions. Not only will a GNU Social instance ignore them and blissfully blat your followers-only posts into the public timeline where they're world-readable but at this point it's trivial to mod a Mastodon server to also ignore privacy controls. You should carefully vet people who follow you before making a followers-only or unlisted post because once someone follows you from either a GNU Social, or bad-acting Mastodon instance, your posts may become world-readable via that instance.

Fourth, as an extension of the above but deserve of its own point. If you use a GNU Social node to follow a Mastodon user, you will be implicitly violating their expectation of privacy due to how GNU Social handles (or rather mishandles) follower-only posts. That should weigh on your conscience a bit.

Finally, no matter which software you use, enforcing Mastodon's privacy model will require sending fewer messages to GNU Social nodes. This means just by merit of using GNU Social you may start being forced out of certain threads and conversations or certain message types. This is a guess and only time will tell. 1.5 will bring the start of this and we can see where it goes from there.

As for my experience with GNU Social...

I'll be honest. I prefer GNU Social's default UI over Mastodon's Tweetdeck clone. I like that GNU Social is simple scripts while Mastodon is either a Docker container or a huge Rails and Node.js stack. I like GNU Social's admin tools and its simplicity stays out of my way. GNU Social better exposes groups as a feature while Mastodon hides them. In almost every way I prefer GNU Social, and yet I'm closing my node and moving to Mastodon. Why?

Looking at the list of people I either follow or want to follow, they all use a Mastodon instance. Every single one. This means a few things for me. First, that they have an expectation that private posts will be private, and by receiving them I'm violating that expectation because of GNU Social dishonoring privacy tags. Second, some of those people are on instances that don't federate with GNU Social or are considering ceasing federating with GNU Social; simple enough. Third, I'm incapable of posting content warnings from GNU Social while my peers expect it-- so I'm just unable to post certain content. Fourth, the GNU Project's mission is fundamentally incompatible with what I want from a social service and, while I can work around that, do I really want to support them implicitly? Finally, no matter how I feel about Mastodon's execution on implementing the OStatus extensions, they are a net positive for the health and usability of the fediverse and by merit of that I am obligated to support that endeavor.

So while I like GNU Social, to continue to socialize with the people I came here to socialize with, and to support the people I feel are actually working in benefit of my peers and friends, I should move to the Mastodon side of things before the inevitable split happens.

What would I like to see happen? I'd like to see Mastodon just fork OStatus, drop compatibility, and implement all the things the devs want to implement. At this point GNU Social users are in the minority; I feel Mastodon would survive if they did this. This would address the criticism that Mastodon showed up to an established party and tried to change the rules on its own, and would free the devs to do what they want without the shackles of backward compatibility.

We'll see what happens I guess.

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Personal Space Cleaning

2017-06-17T09:07:59Z

I took a second go at setting up GNU Social tonight, after Twitter's round avatar-gate set a bunch of people into clamoring for an alternative. It was a much easier experience this time around-- likely because I didn't break my federation with major servers while fumbling around in setup this time. I think I'll keep it around. If it's still working in a few days I'll declare my Mastodon account deprecated. I've already updated my contact page.

I also set this up as my official blog from my website. Nanoblogger is neat and all, but I think it's better to use this. I may port over the old posts to backdated entries here; unsure as of yet.

I probably won't drop Twitter because as of right now I have 6 mutual follows on GNU Social and about 170 on Twitter. Just social space issues... Blah.

Work-side I've had the most productive week I've had in awhile, even if it was a week of setting up alpha-quality software to talk to an alpha-quality storage backend I know nothing about, with no documentation on either available to me. I got it done... somehow. Just the life of a sysadmin grunt I guess. Now I get to transfer a metric boatload of data into the new system and hope it doesn't keel over. The transfer will run over the weekend without any management from me, so I expect to just relax this weekend.

Four Job Fiesta starts tomorrow. I'm excited, though I expect I'll only do one run this year instead of the 2.5 I did last year. We'll see I guess. Everyone should join in though!

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"We regret to inform you milkshake duck is racist"

2017-05-29T04:49:38Z

When I was a wee thing I went to a private school. In fact, I went to a private Christian school for my entire K thru 12 education. One of my main pains of the time was trying to integrate with a peer group that followed a belief system I was only tangentially a part of. My high school class fluxed between 15 and 8 students, all the rest boys, and most of the final 8 were there the whole ride. I didn't have many options for branching out socially.

One of the common sources of social strain was the difference in opinion on consuming media. I loved first person shooters, kung fu movies, heavy metal, and D&D. Most of them found FPSes excessively violent, modern movies needlessly secular and sinful, heavy metal the music of the devil, and D&D to be satan worship. The rare few times we found an interest that aligned between us, I cherished it. Music was an especially rare and special one, especially since we were permitted to play music during our computing classes.

We learned of POD and Creed. Yeah I know, Creed. It was a different time back then, cut me some slack. Neither of these bands scratched the itch for me that the likes of Spineshank, and Drowning Pool did, but they gave me some opportunity to connect with my peers. I got into them, we played their stuff during study hall and computing class, it was nice to have something we had in common.

One day I walked into class and plunked down and started to fire up Winamp (dating myself, right?). I'd gotten my hands on Creed's newer album and wanted to show that off. To my shock, the student next to me turned his head, looked at me, and said "Oh we don't listen to them anymore". What? The reasons pretty much boiled down to one of the songs ("Bullets", if you care) on their recent album had violent undertones, and they had declared Creed to be "Not Christian", ergo they were instantly dropped from consideration. This baffled me, though it was an ongoing theme through most of my high school years; the first sign of secular tendencies from a media source instantly dropped it from the minds of my peers.

What's this have to do with anything? Well the title of this post refers to a specific tweet made awhile ago. This is a tongue in cheek description of a very real thing that happens when someone is catapulted into fame and people begin to peer into their history, whether that be their Twitter history or meatspace history. If something is found to violate the sensibilities of a community, they usually then self-police to remove that person's content from the group consciousness, much like my group censured media they once enjoyed because of (to the external observer) unrelated concepts.

To someone in the thick of it, they're not unrelated though. If someone expresses a viewpoint that is objectively harmful to a group of people, there's definitely an onus to apply pressure to them to change; or to remove their voice from their presence. I definitely don't blame anyone for wanting to do that-- I guess what makes me headtilt a bit is the pressure on said peers to also remove said media from their own consciousness. I've seen a few people flat out say "Stop faving the low resolution shadow pic" because the originator made a transphobic comment 16 months ago. (To be fair, from what I hear they're still kind of awful, so time isn't a factor here)

I guess what it boils down to is if society is required to discard the creations of a person if they find they do not want to interact with that person or consider that person harmful to their structure. I always felt no. I continued to listen to Creed after learning they were no longer appropriate for my peer group; I still find that shadow picture hilarious. I probably wouldn't post it in any circle of my friends that are especially sensitive to trans issues, but it doesn't bother me that the originator of a specific piece of media is a "bad person".

I used to use Orson Scott Card as an example of this. At this point we're aware he's a pretty bad dude but does that erode the quality of his unrelated works? If not, am I causing harm to anyone by engaging in those works? If I bought Ender's Game, or saw the movie, he'd get a few cents off me in royalties... so probably not unless he was contributing financially a cut of his take to DOMA lobbying or something. Conversely, am I sending any message by boycotting his work? Is he likely to understand his viewpoints are causing him financial harm? Would that be likely to change anything? I don't know.

To further muddy the water for me: if someone creates something I enjoy, aren't they deserving of the recognition and financial gain for that based purely on that, irrespective of their political views and things they may have said in the past? That's a very capitalist way of thinking, and that used to be a solid "Yes" for me back when I thought mostly in terms of economics; now I'm not so sure.

At the bottom of all of this though is my personal enjoyment and the enjoyment of my peers when engaging in media. I wish I could attribute it properly, but it floated by on my timeline awhile back... Someone wiser than me expressed this very nicely: You will find problems with any media, or any creator, you look at. If you censure and boycott everything "problematic", you will be starved for media because true intersectionality is a never-ending journey. As we find more ways to identify ourselves, we need to include them in media. At least at present, no one gets that right. Not a single creative outlet. To me it seems the better solution is to consume that media and identify the problems, using them for points for improvement rather than engaging in censure.

I guess above all I find it amusing that I walked all the way across the political spectrum only to find the same behaviors going on on both sides.

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Sometimes I Want to be Invisible

2017-05-11T03:15:18Z

This is more a rant than anything. I started to spew it on Twitter but when I realized it'd span a ton of tweets, well...

In recent years I've begrudgingly accepted the online-only nature of Blizzard titles but something I'll never get past is their social network. For those who haven't touched a Blizzard title since about 2008: being logged into any Blizzard title they don't call a "Classic" involves being logged into the battle.net social network. You appear online to your friends, you can be messaged or invited to parties. That's pretty cool. What's not cool is your status options: you can be available, or flagged busy. There is no offline, there is no invisible. For varying definitions depending on the title, if you're in a game, you're visible to your friends list. Period.

Some days I just want to sink into a game for an hour or two and keep my social stuff off in another window. That's how I enjoy gaming, and I'm by far not an unusual case. So it's frustrating to be forced to announce to my friends list that I'm playing a specific game. More often that not that is immediately followed by someone else (or many someones) logging in and sending party requests. Requests I feel obligated to accept or I'll be forced into a long awkward conversation instead of gaming anyway. Sometimes the people asking to join don't want to do what I want to do; more awkward conversations.

So solutions? Don't add anyone to my friends list? No can do, or I can't party with them when I DO want to. You have to add before you can send invites. Set myself busy? That just moves the long awkward conversation to another medium like Discord or IM. Tell every person sending me an invite I'm not interested? Why should I have to do that? Tell people that busy = don't contact me? Why should I place the burden of remembering that, or playing guessing games about my status, on them when this could be fixed with a simple toggle?

I know the answer to why this is: Blizzard wants to use the friend list system as advertisement. "Oh four of my friends are playing WoW, maybe I should dust off my sub"... They lose some of that if people can go invisible. Still, on the other side of the sword, I've literally wanted to play a game and held off because I didn't have the spoons to deal with the social aspects that would be forced on me by the lack of invis option. It's frustrating.

I guess all in all it feels like my comfort in using their products doesn't matter. I know it doesn't but usually companies don't go out of their way to make me FEEL that way, you know?

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I Guess You Can Call This a Brain Dump

2017-05-07T08:52:13Z

I just got in from jogging in the rain. That wasn't my intent, but what can you do? I walked up to the 7-11 to get drinks and when I emerged, a medium drizzle had appeared out of nowhere. It was the warm, misty kind of rain that falls on you and just kind of immediately disperses into a slick tepid coating that feels more like a layering of residue than actual water. So I double-timed it back home, towing along a double gulp of what I thought was Dr. Pepper but turned out to be... well I don't know what.

So now I'm at home watching the start of the Sunday morning bar closure circus of bad driving on the streets outside my patio door, sipping this mystery concoction that tastes of little more than carbonation, aspartame, and perhaps just a twinge of Pepsi. I suspect the soda fountain at the local 7-11 needs cleaning, or perhaps the hoses are just entirely mixed up. I guess that's one way to make sure I don't binge on soda and end up staying up all night.

I will admit it feels strange spouting off into a text input box on a website anymore. When I was in high school and college, it was a ritual I engaged in every night... sometimes twice daily. I had maybe 60 or 70 people interested in what I had to write, though it was usually just ramblings of whatever came to mind at the time-- a sort of debug log for my brain. It wasn't enough for me though to ramble and attach a mood to the post, I attached a color to every post, recoloring the whole thing by wrapping the entire content in HTML tags. It was a sort of synesthesia in that I assigned a color to my mood at the time, and that color to the post. In retrospect it probably wrecked the reading experience of anyone not using a dark background colored theme, but it's a thing that was special to me.

I had been reflecting on those times again after a conversation about old identities. For years I'd chosen the moniker "Lonewolf", or more frequently some permutation thereof because someone had always beaten me to the name. I was an edgy kid, telling people I didn't want friends or a girlfriend, I didn't want to socialize. I wanted to be seen as the silent, wise type though most of the time I was anything but. More importantly though, I wanted to create things. Writing, game design, etc. I spent most of my time in high school administrating and designing for Mithica, and I do miss the ease of which I could just turn ideas into reality there. Sadly Mithica folded, and I doubt Graal even hosts servers for free anymore like they did back then.

I kept that name, and that attitude, through my Sophomore year of college. It was the gateway that got me into totemic spirituality really. Despite the name initially being more about the "Packless loner" persona than literal identification with wolves, I came to accept the wolf as a totem and guide in my Senior year of high school. Imagine the confusion that resulted as at the time I was still deeply mired in a Christian household, school, and church life. Still, it did me a lot of good; it opened the door to alternative ways of belief and thought that eventually congealed into the amalgamation of appropriated beliefs that I consider my current spiritual canon.

I guess the point of all of this is I'm just now coming to realize and accept that I never had that breakthrough moment where I "became a different person" despite embracing half a dozen (exactly) specific unique identities through my life. It was always a gradual change, an evolution. There are of course moments where I changed my name, changed my guide, but they were moments of realization of change that had already occurred, not moments of sudden change on their own.

Maybe that in and of itself is a valuable lesson, especially now in this time where I'm expecting change from people in my generation. That change isn't a magic epiphany moment where a person suddenly becomes different in every way; it's a series of small events pushing toward a different end. Even if you can't drive a total change for good in the people around you, you can be one of those small pushes. They add up eventually; they did for me.

Long story short, a person is the sum of their experiences. Big or small, those experiences add up to make a different person going forward.

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