If you've ever been an actor, there's a good chance you've had dreams where you were due to go on stage and couldn't remember any of your lines. It's so common that Christopher Durang wrote a one-act play about it, called The Actor's Nightmare. As someone who did high school and college theatre, it's a dream I've had many times.
Last night, I had The Speedrunner's Nightmare. I was doing a GDQ Hotfix show, and about 10 minutes into my run, everything started going terrifyingly wrong. The game was glitching out in ways I couldn't even comprehend. I was going through areas I couldn't remember ever playing before. At one point, I spaced out to the point of getting up from my computer before remembering I was in the middle of my run and hurrying back. Somehow nobody seemed to notice or care that I had just stopped running for a minute. And then my computer started to just literally fall apart. There was a point in my run where I had to press the F8 key (and no, I have never actually run a game where I'd press the F8 key) but the F8 key had fallen off the keyboard and I couldn't continue. It was all so horribly embarassing that I knew my speedrunning career was over at that moment.
...so anyway, tune in to GDQ tomorrow at 7:00 PM EST, if you'd like to see what is apparently going to be the humiliating end of my speedrunning career! And if you've ever had an acting and/or speedrunning nightmare of your own, I'd love to hear about it!
