Why do I do it?
Every time, why do I choose it?
Love made me ruthless
But every time
Why am I running back to you?
If dreaming is useless
Then why even do it?
Keep making excuses
Why am I running back to you?

Thinking about all the times that I blamed others for changing, and the times when people called me out on it.  What should they have done instead?  Should they have simply not let me into their life at all?  I'm sure some of them -- the less important ones, maybe even some of the more important ones -- certainly tried.

Maybe it's wrong of me to act like I'm all high and mighty, but certainly it couldn't be wrong for me to feel sadness.  Perhaps, it simply sometimes rubs the wrong way to act like a victim when thinking about these things.  What should they have done?

Hah, but even as I say it myself, I can feel my conviction rise up -- not only mine, but my past self's too.  No, this is not how it should be.  Everyone moves on too quickly and then complains that we are distant from each other.  There it is again, pointing the finger at everyone other than myself.

Do you not feel it?  The scars of time, the strings of the past pulling you back.  Have you already become numb to it in your endless pursuits?  The you of yesteryear is already dead, and you move forward with nary a mourning period.

 

...anyways, I'm also thinking about blame, and conflict, and these things.  About why we feel that we must change to make things better.  We learn to repress our emotions and then go to therapy so that we can rediscover them.  Who are you to decide that something is "better" than what you already knew to be true?  Perhaps your definition of "success" is too narrow if all it looks toward is growth.

 

But back to recounting the details of more mundane matters at hand.

Aside from being reminded (face it, it was bound to happen eventually...I depend on -- no, =welcome= -- being haunted by my past) of the existential problems of life, things have actually been quite alright recently.

As far as ALTTPR goes, I have to be a little bit careful that I'm not burning out, I think (maybe on more than ALTTPR, honestly), but it's been rewarding still.  I've spent time uploading some rebroadcasts of matches in the mentor tournament with my own commentary to highlight some of the stuff that the mentees have been doing.  Commentary is something that I was curious to dip my toes into, so I signed up for that role, but I found that (as usual?) I ended up just wanting to do my own thing with it instead, so I haven't been hopping on any of the official restreams.  Which is just as well...I've found a comfortable thing for myself, and it seems like it's appreciated by at least a handful of people.  Comfort...yeah, that is important to me, isn't it?

I did a bunch of programming efforts toward routing one of the ALTTPR dungeons.  Hopefully this framework will prove to be useful and extensible in figuring out how to route the other dungeons as well.  I'm happy to be able to finally have some results (though they...all just match my hypothesis to begin with...), but at the same time there is this kind of sense of dread at "okay, how in the world am I going to present this?".  I'm loathe to make a video that just says "Well I crunched all the numbers and this is the best thing" because part of the primary motivation behind my instructional ALTTPR videos was to provide video evidence backing all of my claims, but unfortunately routing Misery Mire is something that I just couldn't do simply.

Part of me wonders whether at some point I'll just take it upon myself to host my own organized wiki of sorts, with gif'ed versions of screen strats as well as documentation on strats.  It would certainly take a different sort of work than my current bite-sized rando series, and I think it would probably be less "easily digestible" (one of the other goals of the series), but there is a growing part of me that hates how ephemeral and scattered about all of the information is all over the place.  The Super Metroid folks have done a great job with this as their wiki literally has a separate page for every single screen in the game and they all connect to each other.  Great resource.

Then of course there's a part of me which hesitates to bite off way more than I can chew.  Again, solving one problem only to be confronted by larger issues, is something that can quickly lead to a feeling of burnout, I think.  So I'll be careful with this.

 

My idle speedcubing practice has continued to be a bit of a habit.  I have weird ambivalent feelings toward it, especially now that I'm of course reaching the same plateau point that I kind of was at before in terms of my knowledge and learnings.  But at the same time I got some new PBs the other day and that was actually surprising to see, like actually though, I'm quite a bit better now than I once was, which is kind of exciting.

Continuing to enjoy just hanging out and working at Teance.  Despite being someone who really prefers to work exclusively at home in my own room a good majority of the time, I can really kind of feel the appeal of working outside or at cafes now, for that sort of change of pace.  Of course, the tea itself is really a big part of it, though.  Far Leaves Tea just got a moonlight white tea in stock too, that was nice to have and just work there during that day when our power was out...

 

I'm itching to try more keyboard switches, lol.  Once this restock happens in the coming month I'm planning to just get a 10-pack of five different linears and just try them out to see.

 

Why is it that people are so quick to break the promises of their past selves?  Is it just that people's past selves are not someone who they have a close relationship with?  Do they feel like it's just a one-sided relationship?  Do people not think enough about their future selves when making commitments?

I have a relationship with the past you, too, don't you see?  And most of your relationship with me has been with the past me.  Why do so many people fail to follow through?  Why are the desires of your present self more important than what you once wanted?  Is that what it means to "live in the moment"?  To shove aside your responsibilities, break free of the "chains" of your past?

No...

Things are alright :)

I finally made it out to Teance Fine Teas and oh...it really warms my heart being here, haha.  The atmosphere and vibe is actually not quite what I expected, it was much warmer and more tranquil than I thought it would be.  Soft light filtering in through the skylights as I sit here quietly, a steady presence in the corner as a handful of people come by and leave.  Most importantly, the white teas!!!  I'm looking forward to trying them all, but already I've quite enjoyed the two that I've tried.  A familiar base and a comforting energy, but with a touch of different complexity in their flavor.  The perfect way for a creature of comfort like me to try something new...

=====

The ALTTPR mentor tourney has been going...quite well actually.  Somehow my mentored races have gone....8 and 1 in favor of me and my mentees.  I mean, most of the credit there is not mine, but you have to admit, an 88% win rate is certainly nothing to scoff at!!!

Partly thanks to some kind works from some of my mentees, but mostly due to practice and self-reflection, I've noticed that I'm starting to shed a little of the internal impostor syndrome that I've (either consciously or unconsciously) held around ALTTPR.  I've always felt that I'm in an interesting "involved yet not involved" spot when it comes to the rando community due to being invested and interested enough to study a lot about the game (in my own ways), yet also remaining uninterested in most community events and competitions and staying largely in the outskirts of things as an introverted loner.  (...although I'm starting to think lately that maybe I just have a false impression of how involved everyone else is)

Last year was interesting because I knew from having won the Mentor Tournament in 2022 that I was certainly skilled and knowledgeable about the game to a good extent, but at the same time felt almost underqualified to be a Mentor (not that there is any sort of objective "qualification" that demands being met besides a willingness to contribute toward the growth of others) given my lack of competitive experience (and how I stopped practicing nearly as much, thus always feeling like "eh, I'm not really in top form like I used to be").

That carried over a bit into the start of this year; when I was asked to host one of the "Boots Camp" intro sessions to kick off this year's tournament, my initial reaction was "oh...really, I'm qualified for this?"  But of course after thinking about that again I realized that was nonsense; I had already done plenty of polished instructional videos on YouTube; this would be slightly different but really not that much different at the end of the day (I ended up being quite happy with my preparation and the information that I presented).

But really I think it was over the course of my mentoring practice sessions, and even my on-the-side casual plays that I realized that I've really gotten =quite= a lot more refined in all aspects of my play (execution, knowledge, and decision-making) since two years ago despite largely having "self-studied", so to speak.

My efforts in creating all of my 30+ "Bite-Sized Rando" videos on YouTube have also felt really validated recently...not just in how I've been able to point to them when sharing knowledge with my mentees, but honestly just realizing how much I've learned myself through the process of creating them (and how useful they are to refer back to when I inevitably forget something or other, lol).  As usual, I'm appreciating my past steady and diligent efforts...

I almost hate to think it out loud, but honestly there's a part of this new confidence that has also stemmed from simply listening and watching to other mentors and realizing that there are, in fact, times (maybe more than I would have thought) when I have knowledge about the game that they actually don't.  And that volume of knowledge has been slowly accumulating as I do more and more work to unravel what "good play" should look like.

Admittedly, it is a strange feeling though; like, why is it me of all people that would be the one doing this work to time out routes and calculate EVs and produce content about it, when I've always considered myself to be a hermit on the outskirts of the community that doesn't really get involved?  Shouldn't other people have done this work already?

Well, maybe it's not super surprising if I really think about it (and let's not pretend that I'm literally THE ONLY ONE, that is certainly tooting my own horn more than would be legitimate; there are certainly others who have done a bunch of good work, though perhaps not organized in the same way).  I think I've got that interesting mix where I play the game enough to have the skill and base knowledge, but also have the technical know-how and setup to be able to record emulator inputs, play them back, and then synthesize the side-by-side timings in avisynth, plus (and let's not underestimate this) the diligence to actually want to do it and put it up in a nice format.  I guess it's really for the same/similar reasons that my social dance events have ran so successfully in the past -- I've got that sort of unique blend of being both dancer and musician, but more importantly someone who has the know-how to precisely edit music, and also know =how= the music should be edited and sequenced for people to enjoy, because I've been around enough to know...

Perhaps part of this is also simply the nature of how information sharing just tends to be more ephemeral; you just get questions and answers buried deep in the message history of one of a million different Discord channels (because of course there are dozens of decentralized ones floating around).  Even in those cases where someone puts in the effort to time something out or come up with the detailed answer, it just gets posted somewhere and then vaguely remembered as "oh yeah, according to ___ you should do this here because they timed it out and it was fastest".  And that just ends up getting mixed in with all of the off-the-cuff "well, you should do this because it's better" that people say based purely on their intuition and all of a sudden you have very legitimate facts being mixed in with the equivalent of old wives' tales.  The end result is that you can't really believe anything until you do the science to test it out yourself, or until you've seen the video evidence (which is why I started my YouTube series in the first place...).  There IS certainly a lot of room in rando for differences of opinion on how you should tackle/play various situations, but raw timing comparisons and EV calculations ought to not be an area where you have to go with subjective opinions.

AAAAnyways, all that is to say, I've been really enjoying/appreciating this opportunity, probably more so than last year, and it's been good to have that around in my life to keep me busy / interested / excited about things.

=====

Work on Rhythm Quest continues slowly, as always...I got just a little sad (as always) thinking about not only how long the project has taken but also how much income I've lost from only being part-time...but hey, you know, it's all relative -- I'm making infinitely more than I was when I had been full-time on Rhythm Quest without a primary job, haha, and having coverage for therapy sessions and dental work and all that jazz is certainly not to be taken for granted.  I've been doing my best to just get as many good little bursts of productivity in where I can, and try to make the work feel less intimidating.  When all is said and done, I'm probably doing exceedingly well given the challenge of it all...

=====

It's a good feeling, to be able to count those small blessings in life.  To have those moments where you truly feel alive.