Since the weekends these days kind of feel like a house arrest, I have some time to kill and I’ll try and remember what it feels like to experience the joy of blogging once again.

So if you’d like something to read, I’m essentially giving myself a post mortem over a foolish venture into streaming.

I have played a fair amount of things since the last time I’ve even written one of these, but I’ve been wanting to focus so much more on doing video as of late. From that time I enjoyed Nier Automata even though I have some grievances about the kinds of things it is. ( though I doubt I’ll touch up on them, since that time has come and gone. Unless of course I bring it up again in a GOTY capacity.) To my annual play through of Actraiser. Which mind you is still one of the greatest SNES games ever made, classic Enix is almost underrated.

I noticed that the last time I actually wrote something was about getting the Switch for the first time, which I am enjoying here and there. Plenty of TetrisxPuyo, Splatoon 2, Recently trying the Octopath Traveler demo, and from what it gives me, I am eager to see this game when it goes gold.

Today I’m writing about being late to the party on the whole streaming thing. I suppose I have been thinking about doing it for some time and flirted with it here and there, but I often get discouraged about doing something that thousands of others pretty much do.

Also the whole, adding more to my plate thing… I don’t think I should be playing video games in a way that makes me busy.

[Keeping in mind that I play a lot of Overwatch of course. When that’s the game that you sit there and play a lot of while thinking “I should get into streaming” there’s pretty much a daily queue of everyone else doing the exact same thing. So where’s the niche? I could constantly bring up that I play the PC version with a controller, but that's only because I'm a scrub?]

I started with Final Fantasy XII (Late to the party with streaming but I just couldn't wait for ZombiePie to get to it, so I took matters into my own hands.) Being a huge fan of that game, I had it in my head that this was the thing that will get me into it. I wasn’t really banking on the idea that I was going to sit there and be entertaining, but have things to talk about as they happen in the game. What better way to break my streaming cherry than to play a game behaving like I know what I’m talking about.

[I realize after typing this stuff, that I have streamed games plenty of times before, but I guess I'm making a comparison of only doing that for friends vs thinking of streaming for a wider audience.]

You’d think that years of theatre, film and podcasts would prepare me for talking about a subject on my own for longer than an hour, but I very quickly learned how important it was for me to have things to bounce off of.

Sure I could constantly go for the low hanging fruit about how shitty of a character Vaan is, (which we’ll have to have a separate conversation about how I firmly believe Vaan is only the way he is because he’s supposed to represent you, the player. You’d figure that was a Waypoint think piece by now.) or gratuitous conversations about Fran, but I suppose there’s just a disconnect--or a self awareness with the fact that I want to play through the game as I normally would while also being put on display.

So I b-lined it.

I just kept going without doing sidequests, like I wanted to get off this track that I made for myself, but the only way off was forward. Cause I would start thinking to myself, “What’s actually going to work here? Always be in a new area every time I stream? Don’t bother with grinding for experience points or gil? Just stick to one team you don’t need to level up everyone?”

And archiving was a different story... Being on twitch, but not being a special twitcher, means that my archive doesn’t stay up for very long. So the obvious answer to that was to just export to youtube, but then each of these streams averaged around 2 hours. So then the question I asked myself was, “Is it worth it to archive the whole thing? Or should I be cutting these down?”

When I’m the one person on my own, I know I can’t be that entertaining, even if there is the crowd of people that just want to have a very long video to sit in front of as the do something else. ( When I have a friend that listens to my podcasts, and this is what he tells me, that’s get into the back of my mind.) So then every once in a while I would edit for time or add some sort of visual for visuals sake.

Then at some point, I was just happy to be near the end. Eventually finishing with 18 parts and around 36 hours. Wondering if I even learned anything from this experience.

I think I learned that FFXII is actually a pretty short game.

I don’t know if I want to add some sort of addendum that video production is a blah-blah-passion but I clearly don’t want to end it there. I want to continue to learn these things like bit rates and Ps, (I have friends living in areas that are still in the internet dark ages after all. compromising quality to allow people to watch? There has to be a better way!) and finding my comfort zone. I know now that what works best for me, is to not upload an entire archive if I’m by myself. So now as I play through Fallout 4, I'm going through the process of editing down a 2-3 hour stream to 20 minutes or less just so I can make more work for myself.

Which only makes sense as a video freelancer, practice makes perfect.

But most importantly doing a thing I want to do, and learning to have fun with it (I get backseat game’d when I play Overwatch (jk jk) so I’m learning to have fun with it).

Plus, I secretly link a bunch of dumb videos of mine in this blog post like a gawdamn shill.