I'm seeing a lot of very strong players in my division, and some familiar faces from AJ's Christmas Tourney.

This is my first official and second-ever tournament. Hopefully I'll pose some kind of a challenge for my fellow D5-ers. Keeping a blog-type thing going for this.

Good luck to everyone.

Strengths: Jacks/minijacks, jumpstream, jumpgluts, excellent chord cohesion
Weaknesses: "Strange" patterns, rolls, speed inconsistency

Round 1 (Retro City):

Score: 1-0-0-0

Thoughts: Lots of minijacks. I'm good at those. Lots of awkwardly placed notes that feel like they really don't belong at all. I'm not good at those. Blackflag was good enough to keep going though, I didn't feel like fixing it.

Round 2 (Oops):

Score: 1-0-0-0

Thoughts: Again, minijacks/jack-ish patterns. Still good at em. Rolls threw me off my first few runs, ended up with a blackflag. This file's more fun to play than Retro City in comparison; however, I'm more than satisfied with a blackflag at this point. Currently in 14th with a blackflag, satisfied.

Round 3 (Undiscovered Colors):

Score: 1-0-0-0

Thoughts: God this file is offsync. That's what it feels like, anyway. But in reality it's synced very well and I'm just not used to ffr files being super-well synced :P Was previously panicking about having 2 clean (was 32nd place) but now I realize that I AM DESTINED TO BLACKFLAG EVERY FILE IN THIS TOURNAMENT

Round 4 (Sleep):

Score: 3-0-0-0

Thoughts: Alloyus handstream/dense as fuq jumpstream. Fun file, but jumpstreams don't really fare well on FFR. I dump goods on easy spots and I'm sick of whoring the file, so I'll probably just settle for 3 clean. If that doesn't work, oh well. I have school anyway :p
it worked. 3g was good enough.
also I'm doing well in school AND this tournament, life is good :)

Round 5 (Crow's Ghost):

Score: 1-0-0-0

Thoughts: I didn't think I was gonna make it this far. Crow's Ghost is by far the most enjoyable file I've played in this tourney so far after Sleep; it was also the one that showed me how much I've really skillboosted in the last month or two. Going from having a hard time blackflagging Retro City + not wanting to play it a million times to playing Crow's Ghost a whole 21 times and pumping out a blackflag on that 21st play, putting myself into first place and guaranteeing myself vROFL.

I'm also terrified that my luck is going to run out this next round; however, the D5 file looks a lot less dense than Crow's Ghost and easier for me than Undiscovered Colors, so...hopefully I make top 5. Top 8 was what I had hoped to get, and if I can make it any further in this tournament I'll consider it a blessing.

Thanks a lot to Staiain for SM training with me and the many other people (ORMIX, Bom, Brad, Luis, etc) who joined me for many SMO sessions <3

Round 6: 44 Edit

Score: 6-0-0-2

Thoughts: this file's awkward for me. Way more awkward than anything I've ever played. That doesn't mean it's not stepped well; I've just have been having a hard time on it. I'm hoping to get at least 5 clean; that'll make me feel safer than what I have now :B

Well...my score was safe.

But I'm so done with this game for a while after this tournament; I'm getting way too stressed out over this and I didn't want to be a perfectionist when I started playing this game; I played it for fun. Now it feels like I have to do well in order to feel decent about myself.. It's really getting to me and I'm going to need a LONG break.

Round 7: Lawn Wake XI

Score: 15-0-4-2

Thoughts: life is hard. During this round, shit happened in real life and I'm in a terrible mood now.

aside from that i need to get better at not cbing :< 4 misses but the rest of my run was fairly clean so :S d4u and I were fairly close score-wise this round; I'm going to try to have as much fun with the final round as I can.

Round 8 (WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK): Playing Super Mario World While Taking Mushrooms

Score: 44-0-4-1

Thoughts: Mother of GOD this is a fun file. It's super difficult but...enjoyable :)

This is the round that I got knocked out. I took second place. I wasn't good enough to make 1st Place this time around; it could be a long time before I get into this game competitively again. My fiancee broke everything off during Round 7, so most of my motivation by that point was shot. Spring Break was the week of the final round, but my opportunities to play the round were few; I had three separate sessions to try to do well on the file, and during the session where I got my best score, I was sick and stressed. When I was originally ahead by a good 400 points, PriestREA pulled in front of me with 30 more points than I had, and I had no more time to improve. Kinda disappointing that I'm not getting that first place t-shirt, but it definitely saves me the trouble of having to explain it to all of my friends, haha.

Final Placement: Second Place in D5

Final Thoughts: Taking a very long break from this game now. The tournament was as fun as it was stressful, and I may never come back to play FFR competitively. For now, I'll stick to StepMania/SMO; if you see a user named Mirror in any of the rooms, be prepared because I have by no means given up on rhythm gaming.

Congratulations to everyone who participated, especially top 3 in each division, and many thanks to those people who pushed me to get better and better.

Shoutouts to two of my best friends on this site, wargasm1 and muirrir (Nico). Without you guys I would have given up on this game long ago.

so here it is
thanks again for this sick profile mang :3