Today, 10 years ago, I wrote "Today, 10 years ago, I started speedrunning"

djs

• 5 min read
Today, 10 years ago, I started speedrunning
10 years ago, I decided to join the SDA (SpeedDemosArchive) forums. I like to see this as when I started speedrunning. I was 10 years old at the time, and I thought I would tell you some stories about it and my thoughts on speedrunning now. Before we can get
djs scribblesdjs
Will I write another blog post to celebrate my 20th anniversary? I have my doubts, but it could happen.

Well, it's happening! And I have to say, 2006-2016 felt like an eternity, while 2016-2026 felt like a week. Funny how time works.

I don't have much thoughts on speedrunning now. I am quite out of it nowadays. Judging from my YouTube uploads:

2 runs, 1 IL and 1 meme run over the past 5 years... I think it's pretty safe to say I am pretty out of it. I interact with some old speedfriends on Bluesky, and I am still subscribed to alot of old speedrunners on YouTube, so I occasionally see there some old name upload something and think "neat, they're still alive".

Apart from that I binge Summoning Salt's videos every once in a while (my favorite is probably The Quest to Beat abney317), and various other "world record history" videos. Did you know I am mentioned in The World Record History of Minecraft? I like to bring that up whenever I meet new people, I usually just get a nodd of confusion.

So yeah, I don't have a lot to say about speedrunning. It seems to be very much alive (though all the communities I hanged out in are very much dead) and I like consuming it through YouTube videos more than I like speedrunning myself nowadays.


But it feels sad to leave this historical blog post this short, so let's talk about what else has happened. Mostly because I think it's kind of fun for me personally to go back and read and reflect back.

The last 10 years

In 2016 I was still living at home. I didn't have a drivers license which always weighed down on my mind, but in 2017 I finally got my own drivers license after taking an intensive course during the spring, around the same time Nintendo Switch released.
In 2019 I developed a terrible back pain. I had a physical job where I stood up for 8 hours a day, mostly, and did some bad lifts, and doing that for years eventually caused my back to snap (not literally, but it felt like it).

So in 2020 I started exercising (daily walks) which made me lose over 30 kgs* in weight, which has made the back pain manageable. As long as I take a walk or go to the gym every day it's generally fine, but occasionally I feel it again, but it's tolerable atleast.

*I actually don't know how much weight I lost. Our scale maxed out at 130 kg's, and I went over that. Nowadays I hover around 90-100 kg.

In early 2022 I was horribly depressed and didn't see a way forward. I was living at home, working a mindless job which had hurt my back, didn't have any higher education, and nothing gave me joy. I had nothing that I looked forward to, except GTA VI, but it felt like that game was never coming.

Fortunately I had for some reason started modding Cyberpunk 2077 that spring, and made a mod for it called Hidden Packages, which I found really fun to make, and it made me think I could maybe become a game developer. And so I somehow managed to get myself into a mindset where nothing was impossible and so I quit my job, started apartment hunting, and applied to a game programming school, all in the same week.

A couple of weeks later I heard back and yep, I got in, and I got an apartment! So I moved and started living on my own, and my life improved drastically. I loved having my own place, I met new friends at school, and I got way better at programming (not thanks to the school though, it taught me nothing). It was just fun to be around other likeminded people and make games (see Super Enucleation 3D Plus above).

Finished the school in 2024. Me and some other friends got picked and recruited by some fancy "rich" American to startup a new game studio. He sounded like the real deal and had so many big shot friends, apparently. Turned out he was pretty irrelevant, didn't have any money, and only played Skyrim all day. Only interesting thing about him was that he worked on the Dreamcast port of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

Needless to say, that game studio flopped and nothing good came out of it except some good fun memories.

Fortunately, one of my friends had noticed I loved doing "boring backend stuff", so he recommended me to his dad and so I got a job there at his SaaS company, which suited me perfectly, because I get to use a Mac and sit in the Terminal all day, instead of restarting Unreal Engine 50 times a day.

2026...

On the upside:

  • I have bought an apartment (not gonna rent anymore) and I am moving there in July. I think it will be quite lovely to go from a studio/1 room, to 3 rooms, especially since I work from home
  • Linux has also gotten very good for gaming. I've run CachyOS on my gaming PC for a few months now and I really have no problems with it. I hate Windows and Microsoft, so I am trying to get rid of them as much as I can.
  • My side project timeplayed.me is also fun and I like working on it, and has somehow even gotten a few users. I am just happy to have a central place to track my playtime finally, no matter what platform. I hope to keep it up forever.
  • I've been going to the gym 3 times a week (in addition to daily walks) for over half a year now, so I am in better shape than ever.

But for the downsides... there are many...

In general, I just think everything is bad and enshittified nowadays, and I've become numb to it.

A few years ago I would've flipped out about GTA VI not being on disk, but now I just... didn't really care. I expected something to be bad about it.

I should also be excited for the Ocarina of Time remake, but I already know I won't like it as much as the original.

Then there's AI. I don't like it. I use it a little (asking ChatGPT stuff instead of Googling, and I have code completions/suggestions enabled in Neovim), but I don't want to use it anymore than that. I've tried using Claude and Agent mode a few times, but I just feel disgusted afterwards, so I stopped. But I am rational about it and I don't go around boycotting projects that use AI.

Ultimately how this enshittification of everything affects me is that I am not really super excited about anything anymore. I just assume everything will have something bad about it, which dampens my excitement.

I hope I will eventually find something that gives me joy again, because I have been feeling pretty bleak this entire year so far and it's not that fun.

See you in 2036?

The title will be even more fun next time, assuming I don't accidentally hose my blog in the next 10 years. I accidentally ran this the other day on my Macbook, so there are no guarantees: 

rsync -avu --delete /Volumes/SDCARD /

Fortunately I didn't run it as sudo, so nothing seems to have happened really.