Greetings and welcome; purpose; goals

Hello, masochists all and welcome to my humble abode. This blog will be used to record my attempts to be something approaching competitive in the stick-figure world known as the Kingdom of Loathing.

Mainly these posts will be for my own edification. I will be stating daily goals, posting daily adventure logs, and critiquing my own progress. Anyone who has suggestions, advice, encouragement (or mocking and derision) please post it in the comments. I am going to moderate comments, however that's mostly to avoid spam posts and creepy internet people. I won't censor for language or anything like that.

Right now I'm getting set up to try a semi-fast run for a contest sponsored by  Alliance from Heck. Most of my runs to date have been anything from lazy to downright slow. However, I've realized that I have enough of a grip on the mid- and late-game to start thinking about optimizing a bit. So I'm challenging myself to 1) complete the contest and 2) not come in last.

The rules of the contest require that the run cover the Moxie days on 2 & 3 November. This gives me a little over a month to prepare for the run. Today I beat the Naughty Sorceress in a 15 day, 2194 turn, 12 lucre, 100% Pottery Barn Owl HCNP run. Not very fast, I know - but I figure the 100% familiar added almost a day (no access to fairy, lep, volley) and the lucre might have added as many as 3 days. I permed Springy Fusilli in order to increase my pickpocketing chances.

Here are my plans for the next month:

Run 12: 25 September-9 October. HCNP Disco Bandit. Perm: Mad Looting Skills. Goals: Become familiar with logging turns and with using Mafia. Improve early game decisions. Collect 6-10 lucre. Complete run within 14 days.

Run 13: 9 October-Contest start. HCNP Accordion Thief. Perm: Ode to Booze. Goals: Dry run for contest. Continue to improve early game. Complete run in 10 days. Time between breaking prism and ascending into contest run to be spent in aftercore collecting lucre.

Run 14: Contest run to include 2-3 November. HCNP Accordion Thief. Perm: ? Goals: I'd like to be under 10 days. Watch this space as my goal may change according to how the other runs go.

I realize that I could probably squeeze another run into October, but I don't choose to for a couple of reasons. One is that I do NOT want to feel rushed. "More haste less speed" or some such nonsense. The other reason is that I'll have a houseguest at the end of October and I don't want to have to choose between being social and playing KoL. Sorry folks, RL comes first!

So from here on I'll try to post logs for each day with commentary and goalsetting. Here's to effective adventuring!