I got the record last night in a miscellaneous Spyro The Dragon category (80 Dragons), and I have weird feelings about this experience that I thought I'd try writing about.

This is not the first time I've had a Spyro record. I got the record in Vortex in 2019, in Cheat% in 2020, and in Sparxless 120% in 2021. There's something different about this one though that has been on my mind. For all three of those other categories, there was something big causing them to have a lot of room to grow. Vortex had loads of tricks still to be discovered, tricks that Hop and I started finding and implementing. Cheat% of course had coveless, and the only reason I got the record there is because nobody else had done coveless in the category yet. Sparxless 120% didn't exactly have something "new," but it was a completely new category. I was just the first person to dedicated a significant amount of time to it.

On the other hand, 80 Dragons didn't have anything new. There are good players that have already run it. I just ran it better than they did. I did try to reroute it, and I do still think the route can be improved a lot, but by coincidence the route I came up with ended up being nearly identical to the route of the previous record.

For all my prior records, I felt like I was a mediocre player showing the community, "If I can get the record in this, clearly there's a lot that the rest of you 'good players' haven't looked at." This wasn't just self-deprecation. I don't particularly enjoy grinding speedruns. If I'm running a single category for more than a few weeks, I'm probably getting bored or frustrated by it. I like being someone who shows other people cool parts of a game that they're missing out on. I was happy to get the vortex record back when I did, but what made me even happier was seeing the number of vortex runners more than triple in the years since. But I just don't think that's going to happen with 80 Dragons.

I am good at this game now. That still feels weird to say, but I don't think I can really deny it. I'm not really in world record contention for a main category, but I am the only person to have a top 10 time in the three most run categories, and I still think I'm going to keep improving in the years to come.

Before I started speedrunning, I never really felt like I was particularly good at anything. I wasn't even particularly good at other games. I wasn't a trainwreck in all aspects of life, but I wasn't ever really doing anything remarkable either. I've also heard a lot of other speedrunners express similar feelings.

I think it's good that I've found something to feel good at, but I still find myself falling into old mental habits of writing myself off without giving myself much of a chance. It's something that I need to actively catch myself doing so I can stop it.

I came into 80 Dragons the same way I came into every other category. Try to find something new. Show the better players how much time there still is to improve here. Leave happy knowing that I made my mark.

But that isn't how this is playing out. Other players already left this category unoptimized. I am now the good player coming in to clean up. I got the record by 2 seconds, but I know I can do at least 30 or 40 seconds better. If I can figure out some route improvements, I could even take that up to a minute of improvement.

And I want to make that improvement! I actually am enjoying seeing the improvement. It's all the fun I get from improving my 120% pb, except this time I'm at the top of the board, and there's nothing but my own expectations to compare against.

I have had plenty of concrete examples to show myself that I have gotten better at this game. I did not expect my improvement to show itself as a fundamental change in my mentality when approaching new categories. I am surprised to see myself with expectations of being good at something. I don't feel like I have to tell myself that I'm good at it. I just actually really feel it for the first time. I hope this can extend beyond Spyro, and maybe my mental health is taking an upswing, but we'll see about that.

I don't really have a conclusion to this post since this is just rambly feeling stuff, but here's the new record if anyone is interested.

Right, let me see if I can dig into this a little... so, it's true that I can get bored fairly easily, and often come up with new ideas to keep myself entertained. And I do like to push my limits as a writer, trying my damnedest to grapple with ideas and writing techniques few or none have grappled with before. Yet, I am beginning to realize there are serious anxieties underlying this urge that harm me more than they help me.

I used to enjoy repeating myself, at least when I felt very strongly I'd conceived something worth repeating. I hammered on favorite concepts over and over, I sprinkled certain turns of phrase throughout my work both as clues to connective threads, and simply because I enjoyed echoing them. But within the past few years, I've developed this clawing conviction that once I depict a concept, oh, that's it, it's done, there's no further interest to be had.

Use an idea in flash fiction or a short story? Well, that's dead now, it no longer exists for Ashy. Iterate on things? Create a web of common themes? Flesh out those ideas in greater detail in longer stories at some point in the future? Nope! Can't do any of that! Once others have seen it from me once, they never want to see it again!

And I've grown used to thinking of this as "just the way I do things," which is technically accurate, but... is it really how I want to? I'm surrounded by beings that genuinely enjoy seeing the same ideas over and over, often from the same creators, and not infrequently with minimal changes. Satisfying things remain satisfying, even when repeated. In some cases they even grow more satisfying. Yet whenever I write, I wrestle with this strange conviction that this doesn't apply to me, that I exist under a different standard to everyone else, that I am only worth paying attention to so long as I'm always doing something different.

This probably has its origins at the intersection of my abandonment issues and my creative anxieties, now that I think about it. I'm always afraid of being long-winded, of writing densely, even though that's my favorite thing to do. Even as I see writers, most especially Tolkien, with similar dense tangential styles continue to resonate with new readers right up to the present, I am driven before the constant instinct that I can't do that, that I won't get anywhere.

I'm... I'm genuinely not sure where to start untangling this one. Identifying the problem's one thing, and it's a start, but... I'm truly struggling to fathom how I can return to enjoying the simple repetition of favorite things. I've seen flash-fiction accounts that largely thrive on repeating the same scenario and the same beats, albeit with different wording, on the daily. In fact, they invariably achieve way more success than I do!

So, I'm clearly standing in my own way here, and I want the things I love to retain their charm even after I've done them a thousand times, a million, an infinity of times, but... I'm not even able to comprehend what that would feel like. At the cognitive level, I am genuinely unable to imagine how doing this feels for the creators that do it.

Well... this one's going to take some sorting...

I played a little bit of the Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood demo for Next Fest and I was absolutely blown away. I'm not super surprised, given how much I loved Red Strings Club, but I don't think I was expecting the game to hit me on such a personal and immediate level.

Doing the first two cards, making and choosing their symbology, constructing and collaborating over its meaning and grasping at what I can to build something that's meaningful and powerful to me, it's gotten me reflecting on my journey of transitioning as well as my journey to improve my mental health and continue on the forever ongoing journey of healing from my trauma. It's made me reflect on how much of that relied on concentrated and sustained work on my part, tugging and tearing at the fabric of the world to shape a little piece of it in a way that was pleasing to me and reflective of who I am.

I've always been intrigued by magic, but I've never delved into any kind of actual practice. I don't know if that's going to change or not, but this game has me really excited about continuing on my path of shaping and building my identity into something that is reflective of me, in ways that only I can do, and I am very excited to see what else this game has in store.