I was doing my run verifications as usual and came across this run by @avino in the modhub. avino and I have known each other for a while but I certainly didn't expect this from him - it is a fascinating video and I urge you all to watch it. I'm writing this forum post as an open letter in response to his run.

now, there's a lot to comment on in this run.

firstly let's talk about the list of fruits and vegetables that he's chosen and how he goes about saying them. I like the choice to start out with the heavy-hitting fruits, lots of big names at the beginning (apples, apricots, bananas, pears, all of which need no introduction) and transitioning over to some lesser-known ones. outside of this though I'm personally not a fan of the organization of the list - I personally feel like more vegetables should've been sprinkled throughout the beginning and middle segments rather than having them absent for most of the run and having them completely steal the show over 8 minutes in.

with regards to the fruits, I greatly appreciate the educational value that this run has. I consider myself to be quite well-versed in the various fruits that exist in the world, and yet I still learned about a couple that I didn't know existed from this run. the amanatsu orange, the chokeberry and the buddha's hand are perfect examples of more niche fruits that really deserved to have a spotlight shone on, and you delivered excellently. on the other hand the choices of vegetables are a overall bit boring, keeping only to the common household names despite the plethora of really strong but lesser-known candidates (romanesco broccoli, celeriac) that you could've considered.

once we look more closely however we begin to notice a couple potentially problematic choices.

"pepperoni" was repeatedly referred to as a fruit or vegetable which initially confused me, however a quick search reveals that "peperoni" actually refers to bell peppers in italian - this does mean that there are duplicates but as stated at the beginning of the run duplicates are allowed so long as there isn't too much repetition.

I think that the choice to count apple juice and orange juice as fruits is questionable, since these are products of actual fruits. is it right to call wine a fruit because it's made primarily from grapes? I'm undecided. in the meantime let's compromise and call it a vegetable.

the final nail in the coffin is at 9:31, in which you say "egg" as though it was a fruit or vegetable. I did a background check and came across this peer-reviewed academic paper that concludes that an egg is neither a fruit nor a vegetable, which is absolutely damning for your run. while normally I would be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that this was a totally unrelated exclamation (based on the idea that you were saying so many fruits and vegetables previously in the run that you had "preempted" the hits that were happening here), but because of the culmination of technicalities so far I couldn't let this slide and as such your run has been rejected.

this is a shame because it was looking quite solid - the list was nearing its end right as you were entering the last fight and had you continued you would've exhausted every item on it, which could easily have given you the new world record especially given that you use the nice chair strat at 5:16. best of luck in your future attempts, I look forward to them.

by the way, what's the name of the game you're playing? it looks fun, I might try it out.

welcome to the simple questions thread! the point of this thread is to post your questions and in theory get a simple response answering it. questions can be about a wide variety of dan the man related topics, including:

• questions relating to the route
• questions about specific tricks used in runs
• questions about this webpage (speedrun.com/dantheman)
• more general questions about the rest of the game

if it's related to the game at all you can ask it! the only exception is that questions about the story are strongly discouraged, if you really want to talk about the lore you can go to the official discord community for dan the man. if you would prefer to ask your questions in a chatroom rather than a forum thread you can always join the (much cooler) speedrun discord community, which has its fair share of skilled players capable of answering your questions.

this thread is specifically for simple questions ("why did you pick up the shuriken in 8-4-2;1?" "what's the best method of getting tokens quickly?"), for topics that would need more nuance to answer properly ("what's the best costume?" "should weapon carrying be disallowed?") please make your own thread!

happy posting everyone!