Wednesday, July 23, 2025 by LotBlind
Desperado IV Scheme & Blind Guessing #5: sPeeDrUnniNg aS aRt
Quote of the Run: "This trick is used sparingly as it is easy to die from it unintentionally. Conversely, it is often used to intentionally die very quickly."
Speaking of rules a bunch today, has anyone noticed the % sign is clearly in violation of basic axioms of arithmetics? Zero by zero? Is it zero? Is it ten? All I know is there's a lotta those in today's one megalomaniac run. Got percents and percents &s &s, all the percents in one neat stack, the negative entropy within apt to power a whole substation for a month. Most would get pinioned by decision paralysis between all these undefined mathematical quantities and hit the goon/goonette/goonx cave instead. Not the SDA way!
At a glance, this run is u-nintel-lig-ible. Then patterns start to emerge. Wonderful caleidoscopic patterns of light that seem to emanate from a place far behind your eyeballs and fill your lungs with mystery and a newfound spoy in joonerisms. So it still won't make sense! This run is not something you can predict. It's not intuitive. This run does not follow rules, it does not follow logic, it simply does not follow. You're the one doing all the following, and you'll follow it wherever it may lead, compelled by whatever mind tricks 'guywithalightsaber' is playing on us. Dirty, yes, but cheap tricks they're not, and not all those who wander are lost. Sometimes I was left thinking the mission simply WAS to get WASted, but that's, umm... Saints Row isn't it? Is it?
I may be able to to proffer something to ground you and your viewing experience, before it turns into a daredevil Dodo ride akin to last rhyme time. This experience of brrm brrming about the traffic that we can puff away on a whim, gta-ing any vehicle we damn well please at any time we choose while flouting those rules like the global oligarchy, along with any concerns about social ostracization – picture it all as just an extension of the fantasies furnished by kids' play mats with the archetypal city landscape printed on. This style of playroom adornment is primarily for boys, and icky, however, this is not about me. 🙄 The impression is reinforced in particular whenever shooting up to eagle's heights, and whenever deferring to the superjump to hack through to the next action scene with less of those darned doldrums (Life's too full of 'em! Well, still was when this one came out I guess...). The speedrun turns the game, its fleshed-out urban sandbox an ersatz for imagination, into an object of imagination of the second order. (Albeit tethered to the anchor of necessity. More on this in the column.) The most pleasing part is all the octopial multitasking. It often feels like the kind of wabi-sabi shorthands in kanji calligraphy that I've been butting heads with. The presence of every %% element can often only be felt, not seen.
Always a little trippy seeing the first thing that happens in any typical new game session of Grand Theft Auto III being entering a car... called 'car'. "車", 'kuruma'. That's... umm... Deadly Premonition isn't it? Is it? Before long, we're setting off to collect on the laundromat at least thrice, being expressly instructed to lose the "fancy crap" getting there, when all the "getting there" in this run is triple-distilled fancy crap syrup. That's something no amount of protection money can safeguard you against. You're gonna find legal loopholes, finick, finagle, finesse... The most surprising parts may, conversely, be the ones where we plunge knee-deep in what gives off a faint, quaint air of honest labor, only briefly stirred from our roamy reverie by sporadic events such as the police checking us peevishly into a lamp post, which is beyond bueno as it can always turn bump into boon. You see, the driver's side front door is kind of like the cutaway in a rock guitar: unless there's a gap there, you can't expect to pass a professional image surfing up and down the street, or up and down the mixolydian for that matter. Whether or not your hood is also surfing the wind is a matter of taste.
So don't "jump" this sinking ship channel, leave it to the runner to do all the channel-hopping Ron Obvious never could in this 4:10:05 of a downtown dick-around, dick-around-town, approved in all of its extravagance for ADHD use by our sister organization, the FDA. Towards its dying moments, the run neither lets up nor lets you down. It warms mine weary heart that the final crowning jewel, the last of many luscious layers of icing, is a princess Pony ride! Are we giving the pony a little SMACK as well? ;) Wouldn't that be gorgeous!*
* Disclaimer: LotB is oblivious to any possible profundities or profanities in the title of "Smack the Pony", that millenial British TV comedy in biting bite-sized chunks.
Okay, take a breather and excuse me a minute while I go wrangle a feline into submission. We're into those here. Here's some jovial music to tide you over!
Out of the mouths of babes and gamer bros comes all manner of self-aggrandizing hash. In case this was still floating around anywhere, anytime, "speedrunning is an art" sounds maybe a little pretentious to me; only TASes explicitly welcome artistic flair to override deflated times to begin with, and even the purest TAS-manian speed-Rembrandts are asked to endure the thought they've in some sense compromised their runs if there was any detouring to ply their craft, and even then it's for "entertainment". ("Playarounds" are of course not speedruns.) A similar self-referentialist as I am (Rembrandt is remembered for Graham's number self-portraits, LotBlind talks LotBlind talking LotBlind to herself), I'm not meaning to paint myself with skyward eyebrows here (only the lashes, which I'll do like a picket fence): when I explore games, I don't cry foul, or "Havoc!" for that matter, if I haven't felt edified or instilled with fresh insights for a whole five minutes straight. They won't kill you, but I usually get my insights from "movies and books 'n' shit", by which I mean mostly YouTube, which, to be frances with you, has me by the balls like the "all-time winner" in that Jethro Tull song about the other runaway train of... (reads up on it)... uncontrollable population growth?
Still, I thought this was worth pursuing for a few in a very with-it sort of way, despite my fullest understanding of how there's no worse way to future-proof your writings right now than to speak with conviction on, or to, the third runaway train called "an nose" – urm, well, something like that – having lost relevance a few seconds before even eyeing up the not-well-regulated-enough publish button that plants your hideous witch-marked mug in the online pillory where people can['t un]see. Any lines like "Hey, let's laugh at this misguided Apple Intelligence Summary of what my grandma said when she got stuck inside her rollator!" are but a rotten tomato's throw away from "Hey, remember when that tiger cub still couldn't quiiiiite reach the latch on its cage? Aww... it really had its heart set on it!" Be that as it may, I've scored humanity one final "dub" on simulated brains, in a tennis rally with "CatGPT", the Calvin to its Hobbes, the David to its GolAIth, slamming thoughts back and forth on whether there's really anything to the proposition of speedrunning as a form of art. And today I present exclusive SDAccess to this debate of the spiralling century (out of or into control?). Step right through this here portal. (Starts from my third prompt.) It's an experience not unalike "Being John Malkovich" in case you know that one.
Here's the main spoilers from the Dalek:
"You make a strong case that speedrunning operates outside the bounds of traditional artistic media. While it may evoke aesthetic appreciation or even provoke thought, these outcomes are largely incidental to its core purpose. The medium’s constraints—focused on speed and efficiency—are fundamentally at odds with the expressive freedom and intentionality typically associated with art.
Rather than being 'art,' speedrunning might better be understood as an extraordinary form of craft, sport, or performance, existing in its own distinct category. Any artistic value in speedrunning, as you suggest, likely resides in the eye of the beholder rather than in the act itself."
So speedruns, not speedrunning, can be filed away under "art" only in the way natural rocks formations or could. There's not an artist. Everything is incidental. As per expectation – unless, I suppose, you expressly tell it to just pretend like it's read what you've written and then make sure to SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP afterwards – the bot does technically get the last word in. But consider how its bold -200 centipawn opening BLAMbit was "Yes, there are several compelling arguments for understanding speedrunning as an artistic medium", and next consider how its cerebrally sedate fake-ass-butt spends said last word eulogizing my elevated cognitive abilities like I've just ruthlessly diss-proven the Riemann Hypothesis and swept all its mathematical ramifications off their feet. See, I'm not an academic degrees...-haver, but I am too such a robust Renaissance grrl, just me with myself is enough to fill an entire talent pool. (Are you saying I'm fat, me?!) I'm the entire pool party, too. Apparently Alex O'Connor, degrees-haver and YouTuber, toiled hard to made the recalcitrant runt believe in capital-'G'-God, so no doubt I'm merely a big fish in a small pond here. Or, indeed, a small pool. (Wait, you ARE saying I'm fat, you lousy pile of jealous sentiments!) So will anyone, bewhiskered or not, whisk me up to where I belong? Been waiting. Probably because I'm too heavy to lift. Oh crumpets!
Sunday, February 16, 2025 by LotBlind
Enter Sand, Man
(^ System kept deleting mah bars so I put in some spares... got bars for days, homie!)
Man, someone's really getting a nice buzz (get it? you will, keep reading) from her hormones today. I caught myself thinking "gracious, that's a beatiful sine wave I find undulating its way into the discerning depths of my auditory cortex" as only a basic bitch can. Follow-ups, in a jumble: "How far can he glide?! Guy's like a flying squirrel on a frisbee above a steamy caldera."; "They fell short of graphics budget before animating the fire tiles so they leaned on that famous Famicom flicker to pass it off like you could toast a few creamy-dreamy Fluffy Puffs on them, or bake primitive bread somehow lazier than Minecraft." and "The outfits... there's one for each color channel." And there is! Jack changes colors. The screens change colors. I still can't quite tell why that needs to happen, and I wear women's clothes.
The last few strokes of this run, a skeletal arpeggio pattern concurs with a rodential run animation to ruin a good anticipatory bone-tingle with banal incidental drollery. But equally sullying the mood is all the leaping around even on flats: "When life gives you lunar Gs, make lunar Gs-cake!" I thought at first, but then realized how... down-to-earth the runner in question was... and found out the jumping obviously has ties with enemy manipulation. 🤦
Here we have one of those ironies where the game rewards you for being quick with slowly accumulating carefully hand-tallied end-level bonus points... and so punishes you for it! I think the reward for quick should always be more of the same, like if you've gotten up sometime before you went to bed to be THE FIRST BY OODLES at the nearest Six Flags that day, there isn't anyone there going "Oh, you're here already? In that case you have to wait there by the security booth for a hundred other guests to have passed through, post which I have to shoo you back to your car and tell you to drive off and try again another day. Sorry, it's to discourage this exact kind of behavior, tsk tsk." I guess they weren't gonna let you ride the biiiiig dipper all by your little old self anyway. Funny thing, they did me once! The biggest, baddest rollercoaster at this popular Finnish thrill park on a rainy day of yesteryear. I got three consecutive rides in without having to leave my seat, without any gagging in the inversions or having to endure any second opinions on how it was: it was great each time 👍 and in some sense illustrates why, to this day, feigned solipsism remains the backbone of my joie de vivre.
This time, the pyramid gits blow'd up real good... and it's still sand! I know you know I know I've told you about this. I still don't dare venture any guesses as to what that "GDV" figure is, but it should be noted it is 69 this time. I'm giving the runner much benefit of the doubt juice here in resisting the notion he's done that on purpose somehow.
BUT WAIT, a second run for the same game came in while I was writing that. This requires to differentiate between them somehow. Well, the former was the best ending in 0:11:29 with just deaths (i.e. rightful ones), and the latter, by contrast, any% with deaths and warps in 0:06:21. The game and runner the two runs share and thus I haven't any need of mentioning. EDIT: I've been told I DO have SOME need of mentioning, and it is indeed old faithful 'ktwo' with more Mighty Bomb Jack, 1987 for the NE-S. No, not just any 'S', the NE-S. To get the game started, you press the NE key, and for our modern audiences, to see the swastika, you go to round 14, but it IS the nice way around.
I suppose the other, any% run deserves a few verbal endearments too... Well, for starters, we're re-rediscovering the same "hidden option J-for-joke" warp, which is less like a teleport and more like warping the hardly-unwritten rules of game design, leaving us with the same ponderings about why the ancients put it there, what its function was. Maybe it's literally just a service hatch like the kind that genuinely irks the hell out of the architect that you've found out about? Cause let's make this clear, it WASN'T MEANT TO BE FOUND. I suppose this helps to sell the whole "pyramid" shtick: them 'gyptians seemed to enjoy a little Easter egg every now and again. I can totally hear Radiohead's ode to these... massive mysterious mounds, these... tremendous timeless tumuli, on top of the gameplay, which sounds far-fetched. Now that you (meaning me) mention it, there's a little bit of something there if you just listen to the sound effects when doors spring open and Jack lopes around, glissandoing in ways that don't completely fail to resemble the eerie wind noises in Pyramid Song. Geez, I hope this won't be the last time I get to aim my periscope at these exalting edifices of yore. My pyra-scope.