Table of contents

moozooh in real life

My name is Vladimir Sergeyev (rus: Владимир Сергеев), I am Russian and I live in Moscow since 1985/10/23 (which conveniently is my birth date). I've graduated from International Institute of Advertising, and am currently working full-time as a copywriter at a small creative agency.

moozooh's personality

My personality type is INTP (consider that a warning). I'm a hedonistic (totally), cynical procrastinator with somewhat weird sense of humor. I like logical thinking, and partly because of that, enjoy arguing — sometimes just for the sake of the process of arguing. I believe there is no better way to stress-test one's own system of beliefs and arguments.
Most of the time I'm rather cold and sometimes harsh, but never bilious. I don't hate people, though it may sometimes appear so, since I rarely show any emotions other than joy, and thus it's rather hard to guess my actual feelings toward a given person, object or event. I also tend to be nerdy, sometimes picky, but I try not to overdo it. I don't support malicious intents. I like to help people in areas of knowledge I'm confident in.
All in all, I could've become a superhuman entity back in 2005, but I'm kinda too lazy for that. So long, world conquest, seeya next time.

ways to contact moozooh

E-mail & Gtalk: moozooh @ gmail.com.
ICQ: 178293267.
AIM & Skype: moozooh. (I barely ever use them, though.)
IRC: #tasvideos, #sda, (@freenode); #metroid, #smr (@irc.metroid2002.com), #shmups (@EFnet).
Cellphone: (available by request).

moozooh and art

There was one point of my life, when I suddenly realized that there was hardly any ideological difference between chaos and order. What seems to be chaotic, is often strictly organized, and what seems to be a pattern now, suddenly collapses into a mess the next moment. That thought set the reference point for my appreciation of art.
Well, actually, screw that. Everything above is mostly a blabber; I just wanted to try excusing my somewhat random tastes. :D
However, I indeed love elaboration, attention to small details, and mathematical basis in all forms of art. Especially in abstract art.

Graphic art

Dunno, I actually never was too much into graphic art. But yeah, Escher is my daddy.

Architecture

Yet again, it's the geometric beauty that captivates my taste so much. Cologne Cathedral and Sagrada Familia are by far my most favorite buildings to date, while deconstructivist and bio-tech buildings just look bizarre enough for me to adore them.

Literature

I like reading, though I can hardly say what particular authors or genres I enjoy, so I think I'll just recommend two books I really, really like.
While they may be not the most easy and/or interesting read, I've found them to be of that brainshattering kind which you read, go 'WTF', reread another part, then an earlier part, then read the later part again to grasp all the details and the cause-effect relations and such, and in the end, find yourself either very confused or truly enlightened. Once you've read, you never forget them.

Digital/CGI art

First of all, demoscene. I've been addicted to this form of art ever since I discovered tracker music and other attributes of The Scene. A lot of masterpieces have been born since then, so I'll list some of my favorite ones (in no particular order):
The other thing I appreciate is fractal flames. I have Electric Sheep client installed on my computer and I participate in breeding new sheep.

Cinema

I like watching movies, but it's hard to name the traits I value the most when appraising a certain picture. However, it would be sufficient to say that I prefer good taste, deep storyline, and consistent stylistic choices over cliche-ridden movies that carry on solely on the budget involved in production and promotion. I also like it a lot when a movie contains intertextual jokes and other such references.
That being said, I love good comedies. And they're especially good when the fun elements reach, or rather transcend, the boundaries of the given plot and become recursive — that is, they become a parody on themselves, on a certain art genre, on some cultural phenomenon, on anything else beside the object of the actual joke. Aki Kaurismäki is an example of a director that has many of such elements in his movies, for instance, in Calamari Union (1985).
I also enjoy many action movies, especially early Schwarzenegger works and such. Many of them are still very enjoyable to watch, and some of them (like T2 or The Thing) are true classics I re-watch from time to time.

Anime

I enjoy watching anime and do so from time to time. I also have a MyAnimeList account, which conveniently contains everything I would want to say on the matter. I love such services, so handy they are.

Music

Music is, by far, my favorite form of art. My tastes in it underwent some major fluctuations during the last eight years, but as of now, they are rather stable and moderately diverse. Generally, I'm not confined to particular genre; the traits I value the most are: complexity/multilayeredness, emotional value, groove. It pleases me the most when a song is so complex that I can still find new details in its sound years after I hear it for the first time, yet is so beautiful that I can listen to it for all these years at the same time.
They're better illustrated by the ever-so-handy Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (flash needed).
My music preferences concentrate in the following areas:
Out of "less electronic" music genres I enjoy some forms of heavy and/or instrumental guitar music and some forms of folk. I'm not very much into classical music, but I enjoy minimalism, for instance.
My all-time favorite artists are (alphabetically):

moozooh as a speedrunner/pro gamer

(Speedrunner/pro gamer, yeah right…)
My gaming "career" started in mid-90s, when I didn't yet have a PC but still was playing on my SNES. I only had a few games (less than a dozen in total), so I did my best to hoyle the crap out of them. Worked really well on games like Uniracers. Heh, wasn't I naive back then, thinking that just beating the games on hardest difficulties was a feat! Still, I was one of the best players among my friends, which perhaps saved me from a severe ego deflation a couple years later.
During the said couple of years, I wasn't engaged in any activities even remotely similar to that, until I discovered two things: Elasto Mania and the emulation scene.
Not that they were somehow related; more like my competitiveness returned to me while I was playing Elma, and it also helped me hone my mediocre gaming skills to the point that I ended up being a junior member in Crimsonland Elite Club. However, the official forum boards were hacked somewhere in 2004, so hardly anyone aside from Twinsen (then-president of the club and also one of the former champions) could confirm my achievements from that time. That being said, I already made new personal records since then.
Rediscovering the emulation scene revived my interest in old games; and even though I couldn't play them as well as when I was younger (and the lack of a decent controller didn't help that fact, either — playing on a keyboard isn't always handy), I still enjoyed playing the games I had already beaten and wanted to beat.
One interesting thing that connected all this together was a program that gave me the basic concept of TASing. It was called Gear, now renamed to Speed Gear. Essentially, this little tool made most Windows applications run slower or faster, with the ability to adjust the speed to one's liking. I didn't use it to submit cheated times in Elma or Crimsonland, but the sheer idea of tool-assisted playing had unconsciously pursued me until…
…I discovered Metroid Fusion somewhere in early 2003. While Metroid was one of my all-time favorite franchises, I couldn't resist downloading and playing it on VBA. When I beat it (took me "only" two days!), I started to browse the internet for additional information I hadn't discovered myself. Thanks to GameFAQs, I learned that the game had the same old thing built into it: a timer with a reward system, much like that in the precedent Metroid titles. Since I was already suffering from severe ADD back then, I was already using savestates in casual play without any back thought; it was then when I suddenly got an idea of getting 100% of items in under two hours to trigger the best ending. I didn't know of rerecording (apparently, VBA didn't even have that function back then), so I just went through the game with the primitive TASing concept: go the fastest known route using savestates and slowdown to eliminate all the mistakes. I didn't finish that run (stopped at about 30%), but it was something I knew I would enjoy watching.
In early 2004, the similar thing happened with the release of Metroid Zero Mission. Once again I was searching the net for information, and while doing that, I discovered another site I use to visit frequently now — M2K2. I didn't stay there at that time, though, but it helped me to discover another great site rather closely related to TASVideos: SDA. Back then, my internet connection was neither good nor stable, so I didn't download anything from there (especially considering their then-poor capturing and compression schemes leading to low quality or bloated files). Then I just forgot about speedruns for about a year.
In mid-2005, I accidentally stumbled across some speedruns again while browsing Archive.org, and that time it was Genisto's SMB3 TAS. While I wasn't a great fan of SMB3 (or a fan of any Mario game at all), the video kept me interested in further examination of this kind of speedruns, so I went to this site and started browsing the videos. I lurked on the forums for a couple of weeks or so, and, after having experienced a lot of desync problems, finally registered on the site.
In mid-2007, I became very interested in shmups, partly thanks to the sheer greatness of Perfect Cherry Blossom and other games of the Touhou Project some awesome SDA members introduced me to. As of now, I'm playing these and other shmups very often, and am working on score-attacks for some of them. I have also participated in Shmups.com's STGT'07 and STGT'08 in Team SDA. Both times we got the 3rd place overall, and my average individual rank was 34 out of 118 in 2007, and 33.5 out of 152 in the single player rankings, which I consider pretty good, although I believe I could do somewhat better either time.
In mid-2009, I made my first full-fledged speedrun of a freeware game called Spelunky!. The run was published on a superplay site Super-Play!.

Personal records

I'm not deeply into running games these days, mostly because I have neither time nor motivation to sufficiently train/practice.
That said, I still have some recent personal achievements on that part, however insignificant they may be:

moozooh as a TASVideos member

Due to my ever-growing ADD and blatant lack of experience in doing and watching speedruns (and even playing the games, to begin with), I couldn't contribute to the site much aside from theoretical discussions on the forums and chatting in the IRC channel. It took me about a year to start fully grasping the concept in its entirety, and start being able to expertize the runs from a technical standpoint. As of now, I've learnt how to use all the tools necessary to produce my own TASes, and currently am in the process of doing one, with one more on hold. This is cool. Note that my ADD still prevents me from TASing effectively, but on the other hand, I try to keep the production level as high as I can since the pace of production is out of question, anyway.
As of 2007, I've become a considerably well known member of the site, been granted editor powers and my own homepage, part of which you're currently reading.

moozooh's thoughts on TASing, competition and obsoletion

moozooh elsewhere on the Web

I also am a part, though much less significant, of the following communities:
Metroid2002
SDA
Shmups.com forums
Hydrogenaudio.org
MyAnimeList
Super-Play!
Rockbox forums
Non-international:
Vorbis.org.ru forums
iXBT.com forums
QWERTY.ru forums and torrent tracker
I also have a LiveJournal account, but I rarely write there nowadays, and it's almost entirely in Russian.
HomePages/moozooh/About last edited by on 1/1/2022 6:13 PM
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