SGDQ 2021 Begins!

I know much of my blog entries are some variant of doom and gloom, so let's do something a little more uplifting for a change.

It has finally started raining in a substantial sort of way today over at where I am staying in SIN city. The timing could not have been better---it is near the morning, where the air hasn't been heated up by the sun just yet, which provides the opportunity for a much lower temperature once all the rain is done. In a high humidity location such as SIN city, every degree that we can lower leads to rather outsided temperature comfort effects, and thus it is very welcome.

In other news, Summer Games Done Quick 2021 (SGDQ 2021) has finally begun, and it will be a full week of non-stop speedrunning fun, including beloved blocks such as ``Silly Games Done Quick'', the ``Doom Block'', and the ``Nintendo Block''. I can't/won't catch most of it live, partly because I no longer participate in the nearly-abandoned IRC channel (all chatting has been moved to using Twitch's chat, which is... cancerous, to make use of Internet jargon), and partly because the viewing quality using the VODs is that much better than keeping the stream going. I've always been using some standalone proxy service to buffer up to 60 s of video to be streamed through my local running copy of VLC Media Player just to beat the horrendous lag spikes that kept on coming on.

I just get lazier the older I am, and so tinkering to that effect is starting to get old for me. Besides, these days there's usually some Reddit thread tracking the start points for VODs of various runs (this one is for SGDQ 2021), so there is a lowered incentive for me to go ``live''. Back when I was still in the US, I would donate to the charities that the particular iteration of GDQ was supporting, and having the message read ``live'' on stream as an interactive element was cool.

Now, it's gotten too big, and has lost its cosiness. Plus, living in SIN city, donating to GDQ events requires a bit more effort, and well, the time zones don't help much since we are usually in the graveyard shift of the event. Graveyard shift games are still quite cool and cosy, since the longer games and/or less established runners/less established speedrun game are scheduled then. The big stuff is usually during the daytime [of the event], which is when I am fast asleep. Back in the day I would stay awake to watch it ``live'', but man, being older now, it just sucks to be screwing up my sleep schedule that way.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. I might head off to my favourite bar to say goodbye to the manager---it's her last day---and do more reading with glasses of Guinness. The rain should have let up by then, making it slightly easier to travel.

Till the next update.