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There's really no point to rating movies anymore. It's a broken and nebulous system that people are clearly abusing for personal gain and I doubt it's ever going to be properly fixed.
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Canvas Curses loses its wow factor fairly quickly in my opinion. The main glitch makes it far more entertaining than a run without it would be, but it removes a lot of the variety that would have come from actually needing to deal with each stage.
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Hey, welcome to how the world works. Here's some fun bits of crushing reality that I can at least spin into proper advice.
1) If people hate you, you will get called out for absolutely everything you do, even if you do everything right. People will go as far as to lie in order to make you look worse.
2) Bonding with people who hate you is impossible, regardless of whether or not you're working with them, for them, or under them. They will actively find ways to destroy you and stop at nothing until you are indeed destroyed.
3) and 4) People who hate you will always prefer other people who hate you, and in a case where everyone hates you, it's pretty fucking clear that said other people are going to be the ones that get away with everything. Follow their example all you want, it's not going to work. These people can also get away scot-free if they fuck you over, even if they're the ones ultimately doing the shittiest things possible in that situation. The world is basically a hivemind against you, and if you don't join the hivemind then you're just going to have a hell of a time.
5) and 6) Yes, even your "friends" are corrupted easily, even people who respected you at one point will lose all respect if the majority is against you. Believing you've befriended someone right after meeting them is the first mistake you make in a future failed friendship, because the reality is that everyone is selfish and will dump you when they're completely sure you serve no beneficial purpose to them. This always happens much sooner than you expect, even if you're expecting it in the first place.
What I'm trying to get at is this: Drop the kindergarten stuff and move on. It's clearly a toxic environment that isn't going to welcome you back with open arms. They're shitty people from what you've been describing, and even if there are some nice memories, it's going to be so much better in the long run to step back. You'll look back on it in a year and know you made the right decision. Wanting to stick around because you like the kids is like joining the fucking military because your friends are in it. You may be around friends but the rest of it is going to be nothing but pain and misery.
I'll be honest, here: This is pretty much nothing but an abusive relationship allegory at this point, and I'm saying this as someone who's been through an abusive relationship. They fucked up and you're blaming yourself for it. It's ultimately a manipulative act on their part that does nothing but make you feel worse and make them feel justified in their fucking atrocious behavior. You can't play into that trap, you can't focus on all the positives, you can't focus on how nice everything and everyone seemed at first. You have to be selfish here. You have to remind yourself how they wronged you. Pick yourself up, burn those bridges, step the hell away from that toxic environment and look for better people. This is the only reason I'm still alive right now.
I could have chosen to remember all the good things that happened between me and my ex, but what would that have done for me? Oh, I know, it would have fucking destroyed my already fragile ego. Those memories would have told me nothing but "Look at all this wonderful stuff that YOU FUCKED UP YOURSELF, YOU FUCK-UP!" So I stopped doing that. I remembered the constant arguments, I remembered every time she told me she was only with me because she thought I'd kill myself if she left me, I remembered the actual death threats sent back and forth, all the times she told me I was faking depression for sympathy, every time she called me a useless sack of shit that she was embarrassed to be seen with... And I could finally just... hate her and everything about her. I completely stopped wanting to associate with that manipulative bitch who was really just using me in order to make herself look better in comparison. I actually started thinking more positively about myself in exchange. I felt freed, I felt like I was the one being wronged for once in my life. It was honestly a life-changing experience to realize that, hey, sometimes it's absolutely okay to be a selfish prick who can't blame themself for anything. As long as you're smart about it, you can be a wonderful, helpful, selfless person who's willing to make some personal sacrifices in order to accomplish their goals, while still primarily looking out for yourself and being able to recover easily once everything inevitably falls apart around you in this fucking dumpster fire of a world.
At no point in your life should you ever have to feel like you need to change yourself to fit in with a group of people. Any time you feel like you need to actively change your personality or your ethics for a group of "friends", just do yourself a favor and leave them before they leave you. Keep looking until you find a group of friends who will accept you for who you are, because they're absolutely out there. Nobody's alone in the world. Not you, not me, not anyone else on or outside this site. Some people band together because they all like the same anime, some people band together because they're all part of a niche community, some people band together because they all hate one specific person. Hell, some people band together because they're just in the same room at the same time. Point is, you'll find where you belong as long as you keep searching for it.
Just to summarize and wrap everything up, though: This kindergarten isn't where you belong. Fuck 'em. Channel out all the good memories and keep the hate. Thrive on it. Always blame them and never blame yourself for what happened, because it's not even remotely your fault. There's always going to be people who understand and support you... Like here, for instance.
And, yeah. Just keep powering through. Stay strong. Each new day is progress, even if it doesn't feel like anything happened. The most important thing is living long enough to tell the world you're okay, and then living long after that as well.
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I figured you'd be used to that by now, seeing as "This is just how it is, end of discussion" is how the site handles 95% of the complaints that pop up.
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Who gives a shit about optimization? Your vote is based on the fact that this run is optimized rather than objectively judging the entertainment value of the run, holy shit what has this site become?
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This doesn't happen as often as you think, and you can never actually tell who's doing it unless they specifically explain their vote.
I don't think any Judge actually works this way. That's literally throwing away well over half of the votes received. I tended to work by discounting a couple unexplained votes since quite a few movies get unexplained Meh/No votes and throwing away even up to 25% of Yes votes makes no difference, but I would always generally go with what the majority said regardless when it comes to tiering.
My main concern with the tiering decision is how hasty it was. It was accepted to Vault four days after submission, even with a 100% positive rating and a number of positive thread posts. I feel like a longer wait before acceptance/publication would have lead to a more confident tiering decision. But, eh, that's just personal opinion.
>6.5 is more accurate, I'd say, though the problem with this is that Vault movies tend to get less ratings in general. Otherwise that's all correct, and it's why mistiering isn't such a huge deal. If you disagree with tier placement, just rate the publication accordingly (and fairly: no 10/10 or 0/0, staff can catch that pretty easily) and it should be moved if there's enough support.
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Overlord or any other rejected run could always get a second opinion. I never felt confident about the triviality guideline for games that otherwise fit Vault rules. I know why it's in place and I was fine with using it as a rejection reason, but it's probably on the antiquated side at this point. Either way, the submission will always be there for future reference.
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Boiling it down to just "I can't imagine it being difficult to TAS" is way off the mark. TASing Pink's stage is the easiest part. In fact, I did the first part of it as a test. The hard part is actually getting the motivation to sit down and TAS it. TAStudio or not (the former, obviously, because TAStudio is the best), I'm just not in the right place to redo half of a run where I would have only saved 10 seconds or so. A lot of my feelings regarding that are explained in the submission text. So, y'know, take some sick days off work and read that novel.
To sum it up, though: I just couldn't spend another month or two on redoing Green's stage and the first part of Orange's stage. This isn't a hex-friendly game at all, so redoing the first stage would have meant redoing the entire run. I've been under pretty heavy stress recently, which was even heavier at the time of the discovery, and the thought of sitting there for another month or two redoing a long, long, long, long, boring stage that I hated TASing wasn't exactly going over well with me.
I'd rather have a finished, improvable run than an unfinished run and a defeated Samsara, and I knew I wasn't going to finish the run if I restarted the whole thing. I would've given it up until I had the motivation to come back to it. This way, I at least got the run finished and submitted for people to enjoy while I recuperate. Plus, I can compare any future improvements to this run as opposed to arki's run, which should be a lot easier if solely for the fact that I don't have to wrangle Gens into working.
Also, in hindsight, I'm glad I pushed forward because of all the other discoveries I made much later in the run, which I probably would have forced myself to restart over as well. I can come back in the future (let's face it, I probably will, because I love this game) and take one solid stab at it with all the new improvements as opposed to entering an endless cycle of "this would be a lot faster in the early stages, I have to restart".
Hopefully that all makes sense.
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I've been thinking about it, but I'm not a good speaker so I don't know if it'll turn out any good. I'd like to do subtitled commentary at least, but for audio I might have to bring in a couple other people to keep things interesting the whole way through.
The run should be is completed and submitted before next weekend.
#5297: Samsara's Genesis Gunstar Heroes in 31:00.33
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I thought about it for a while, and as of today, I am officially stepping down from judging and all other staff-related activities. I'll cite "personal reasons" and leave it at that.
I'm somewhat open to coming back in the far future once all of said personal reasons are sorted out, but I don't foresee that happening for a long, long time.
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Not with these votes. I thought I told you to not force anyone to find this entertaining.
EDIT: This was a horrible assumption for me to make. I apologize.
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Thanks for the support!
I'm making good progress on the shooter stage and managing to save a great deal of lag, about 8 seconds so far (which pushes me above the 2 minute mark for improvements, woop woop) but I don't think I'm going to get a whole lot more improvement than that. I might break 10 seconds if the Seven Force battle goes well or if there's more lag to reduce before that, but sadly autoscrollers and time saves don't usually go hand-in-hand.
I'm mostly just posting because at the rate I'm going, I have just hit 2/3 completion of the run (80k/120k frames), and I should definitely make my goal of getting this submitted by December at this rate. Submission text is going fairly well, too, if this is any indication:
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For a progress update on this, I've got over half of the threads (about 500) in the NES Games forum catalogued so far, though there are a lot of duplicates and non-game threads so the information's not much use. Once all the merging/moving/grueing is done and the IRC channel hates me for making TVA spam it with maintenance messages, I'll probably make and sticky a master thread containing links to the remaining threads, which should be a lot easier to glean from for the spreadsheet.
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Temp encode:
Link to video
I liked the run, even if the game's a bit clunky and awkward (the vertical screen-scrolling is a particular, er, "highlight"). The glitchy top-down sections were an actual highlight, though! Voting yes.
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Did this a while back, but hey it's still done and all.
Speaking of back, sup.
Latter part of Orange's stage redone to save about 4 seconds
Black's stage in full:
Link to video
A little over 17 seconds faster (1036 frames).
I've got about 13-14 17-18 25-26 35-36 a total of 36.63 seconds of improvement in Save Yellow, mostly because it's a flat stage with lots of movement, but also because of a major improvement on one of the bosses. I'm a little under 2 minutes ahead of the published run so far. My goal, assuming it's attainable, is for the final run to be sub-33 minutes, but I'm happy with anything at this point. Working on this run has been a trip.
I've been working on a ridiculous submission text alongside each stage (Notepad++ says the length is about 53000 so far), so the only wait between me finishing the run and me submitting it should just be however long it takes to encode it. My goal is before December, but we'll see how the shooter stage treats me.
I think the above video will be the last public WIP.
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