September Humble Bundle

The September Humble Monthly prepurchase games have been announced and they've added a new twist in this month. I'm not really sure why exactly, but they're giving you the choice between three games or a single game that was in a previous Humble Monthly. I'm guessing maybe the distributors for Rise of the Tomb Raider wanted to be featured again but Humble really didn't want to give away the same game to someone who's been a subscriber of their system forever. At any rate, you can get that single game ($70) or you can get Sniper Elite 4 ($67, but currently on sale on Steam for $10), Tales of Berseria ($65), and Staxel ($22). I've decided I intend to stream Humble Monthly games on the weekend going forward to shake things up from always playing Blood Bowl and decided to go with the three game option primarily because my sister keeps trying to get me to play a Tales game.

The three games are a sniper shooter game, a jRPG, and a farming simulator. A good variety that probably hits a lot of games with at least one of the games and seems like it should really hit me with two of them. I remain bad at aiming but jRPGs are ostensibly my favourite game genre and I really like Stardew Valley. I say ostensibly because I was thinking about it earlier and haven't actually played a new jRPG since probably Final Fantasy XIII in 2009 and I didn't even finish that one. So, well, I have high hopes but maybe my mental image of the genres I like doesn't line up with who I am today? Hard to say.

I'm going to stream Tales of Berseria tomorrow and see how it goes!

August Humble Monthly Bundle

Humble Monthly is a subscription service run by the Humble Bundle people where they sell you a fixed bunch of games for a low price. The bundles tend to be 'worth' about $200 and it costs $12 per month but they are using a non-discounted MSRP to determine that value and you don't get to pick the games you get so chances are you're going to get some games you're simply not interested in due to genres or whatnot.

The trick they use to get people to sign up is they announce some of the key games for the next month shortly into the current month. Typically this will be three games, but when they get a particularly big game they have it as the only headliner. Civilization VI and Destiny 2 are examples of those sorts of games from previous months.

My brother got me a year long subscription for Christmas last year and it's been pretty sweet thus far. I spend too much time playing a lot of individual games (like Blood Bowl in recent times) to play all of them but I have played some of them, that I never would have played on my own, which were great. Quantum Break was a movie/FPS hybrid that I would have never considered getting on my own but it was very cool.

I have recently signed up to be a Humble Partner. Basically this means I advertise for them and if people buy things through my link I get a cut. I did a little bit of this for the game Cultist Simulator which I was given a copy of to stream and generate hype for them prior to release, but I could and should do more.

I think what I should start doing is streaming the preview games for the Humble Monthly with my chat bot periodically spamming the link. Humble really wants their partners to sell the Monthly bundle in that I actually get most of the payment for someone who signs up for the first time. It will also give me a little structure for playing different games, which is always a good thing for me.

The advance games for August were just announced and they are A Hat in Time, The Escapists 2, and Conan Exiles. A cute platformer, a cool looking prison break simulator, and some sort of open world crafting game. The first two were both on my wishlist from browsing through various Steam sales, the third I'd marked uninterested. But it's one of the top sellers of the year, and has a $50 base price, so I'm going to give it a try. Letting people know they can get it (and some other stuff) for $12 could be a useful thing!

Twitch Subscriptions for Affiliates

On Wednesday of this week Twitch rolled out the third stage of their program for getting more income streams for small streamers. The first was the bit system, the second was the game selling system (but the games I play aren't part of that scheme so I haven't really looked into it), and the third is opening up the subscription service, which is arguably the most important option of them all.

Subscriptions allow someone to pay $5, $10, or $25 each month in order to get a few bonuses for chatting on Twitch. Twitch takes a pretty big chunk of that (I had one person sub to me yesterday and my dashboard says I made $1.74, so I guess Twitch takes $3.25, but it could be that Twitch Prime subs are worth less? I don't know!) but it's still a way to set up ostensibly recurring income. Donations (direct through Paypal or via the bit system) are super nice and all but they're very erratic. Someone who is looking to be able to pay rent off of streaming is going to appreciate the consistency of subscription revenue.

There's also the weirdness around Amazon Prime which automatically comes with Twitch Prime which lets the person subscribe for free to one streamer. So it's like your Amazon Prime subscription actually comes with a $1.74 rebate, you just have to have the rebate mailed to someone else. Someone else like me!

As for what the person gets, they get a few things that have never seemed terribly interesting to me but there are a lot of people who get really into them. The first is you get an icon beside your name when chatting in that stream's chat that shows you're a subscriber. Partners can customize that icon and can have different ones for different numbers of consecutive months subscribed; affiliates just get a default star. But it's a way to show in chat that you're someone ponying up to support the streamer, and some people like that, so that's cool. The other thing they get is access to a chat emoticon designed explicitly for the stream. They can use it in any stream chat anywhere on Twitch so if you make a really cool emote then it becomes a form of advertising for your channel. (I've never watched AdmiralBahroo stream, for example, but he has some really sweet emotes that people use in my chat all the time.)

Partners get lots of emotes based on how many subscribers they have. Affiliates get exactly 3. One for each tier of subscription. (But if you have enough subscribers to be eligible for tons of emotes I'm pretty sure you can become a partner too so it's not that big a restriction.)

I didn't do a good job of planning ahead (they did say this was coming in the near future) so I don't even have any emote ideas let alone anything made. You can make changes, though it'll take a couple weeks to get things in or changed, so I really need to keep in mind that it doesn't need to be perfect. Getting something decent implemented quickly is more important than getting the optimal thing done in a year.

So I need to come up with some ideas, and then I need to get 28x28, 56x56, and 112x112 PNGs for those ideas.

Twitch Affiliate

Last week I had a viewer ask me if I was hoping to be part of the Twitch Affiliate program. I didn't even know what that was but told them I'd take a look at it when I got a chance. Well, it turned out I'd already been invited to take part in it and just hadn't noticed the email or notification. Their criteria for who they'd invite is public but they were going to be rolling invites out in waves so while I certainly qualified it wasn't clear if I'd have gotten in yet or not. It turns out I was invited the first day they started inviting people so I'm taking that to mean I'm doing pretty well when it comes to not being a partner.

For those who may not know, until last week there were two types of streamers on Twitch. Partnered streamers (who have a bunch of monetization schemes available to them like monthly subscriptions and ad revenue) and everyone else. Becoming partner requires filling in an application and meeting some nebulous requirements. Now there's a tier in the middle that you can autoqualify for and that brings some of the perks of being a partner and doesn't require a live person to go over your application. It feels like a win-win for both Twitch and up and coming streamers!

Anyway, the requirements to qualify for affiliate are 50 followers, 500 minutes broadcast in the last month, 7 different days live in the last month, and an average of 3 people watching at a time. In April I streamed for 10262 minutes across 22 days with 22 average viewers and I have 899 followers. That's a little more than the minimum!

What does being an affiliate get me? For now, not actually a whole lot. I get access to the bit cheering system and higher priority for getting quality options as their servers allow. The priority thing actually doesn't really change anything because they already had a priority system based on number of current viewers. I guess it'll help if I stream a game where I get significantly below my average number of viewers (those few people might get quality options now when they otherwise wouldn't) but it's really not a big deal.

The bit cheering system is an interesting one. It's something Twitch added a while ago as a way to protect streamers from chargeback fees on various online money sites like PayPal. Basically Twitch will sell people bits and they can use those bits to tip streamers. Streamers then get a payout each month based on the bits they've been given and if someone uses a stolen credit card to buy bits then Twitch will eat the loss instead of the streamer. In return for that protection Twitch takes a significant chunk of the revenue upfront. (A bit is worth 1 cent but Twitch charges you $1.40 for 100 bits. They have bulk discounts too, but they're always taking a pretty big cut.) Now, PayPal also takes a cut of donations too (2.9% + .30), but it seems that fraud notwithstanding it's actually worse for me to get paid via bits than via PayPal. Especially since affiliates need to wait 60 days from the end of a month to get paid for bits. And that they have to pay a fee to get that payment (2% to PayPal is the option I chose)! And if I understand the tax forms they made me fill out in order to sign up the US Government is going to take 30% hostage as well!

There are other ways to get bits than buying them from Twitch, though. People can earn bits by watching ads, apparently, and they can be found in loot crates that they've started giving out in various ways. And obviously no one is going to complain about addition potential revenue streams! It also helps that it's fully integrated to the Twitch system so it's much easier for a viewer to buy some bits and then spread them around when they feel like it instead of having to log in to PayPal or whatever. Getting access to the bit system is definitely a plus!


Coming Soon (tm) they'll be adding on subscriptions, game sales, and ad revenue to Twitch Affiliates, all of which are more exciting to me than cheering was. Subscriptions are a consistent source of revenue and getting even a single channel emote would be really cool. Ad revenue would be nice since Twitch plays ads on my stream without my ability to remove them so getting some recompense for that would be good. And game sales... I know for a fact I'm already selling games to people. Last year I got people back into World of Warcraft from watching me play and I know people have bought things like Factorio and Blood Bowl II because of seeing me play the game and thinking they might like it. So getting a 5% cut of those sales (and making it easier for people to be able to buy the games) just sounds fantastic to me.

So things are looking up. Hopefully I can manage to stay unglutened and put in a string of good streaming days and see where things go from here.

On Deserving Success

A while ago Wil Wheaton made a blog post talking about some things he's been doing to try to be happier with his life. There's one quote that I felt particularly drawn to: "I’m not that great and I don’t deserve to feel good about myself." I can't say I've ever really thought things through in those terms, but I definitely feel like I've never really put in the effort to deserve happiness. Which is a little weird, since I'm a pretty vocal advocate of things like a minimum income provided by the government because everyone deserves a base level of happiness without being forced into slavery to the rich. But it does exist. The logic goes that I don't deserve to be successful, so I don't do what it would take to be successful, so I'm not successful, so I feel more like I don't deserve to be successful. It's a bad spiral.

I've been putting in a lot of time recently being more consistent with streaming. I've gone weeks where I averaged more than 12 hours a day streaming. I think I've only gone one 'day' without streaming at all in months, where I use 'day' loosely as a period of time where I'm awake. I've had multiple ask about donating to the stream, and plenty of people offer suggestions on how to make things higher quality.

And yet, I haven't even updated my profile on Twitch since last April. There are tons of little things I could be doing to make progress on being successful. But I haven't done them. I sometimes think about doing them, but then I just stream something instead, or play an idle clicker game.

I do actually think just streaming things has helped a lot. I used to break into a sweat just having a single viewer show up and chat, but now I can hold multiple broken conversations at once without freaking out. I've settled into a comfortable pattern, which is fine enough, but if progress is going to be made I need to actually make an effort to do so.

Even though I don't think I deserve it.

What I need to do is pretend I do deserve to be successful, and then take steps towards making it happen. So I'm going to make a list of things that I need to do. Small things, sure, but slowly chunking through a list of small things will eventually get to a good spot, without being too overwhelming at any given time. And hopefully without breaking the facade of pretending to deserve it.


{As an aside, Wil just made a 6 month progress report on the things he's working on. I created this post right after he initially made his post, which means I've wasted 6 months without putting in very much work. No surprise then that my stream really hasn't grown very much since then, huh?}

• Set up a green screen.
• Write a more detailed 'About Me' profile.
• Buy a scissors boom for my mic.
• Sell my old Magic cards.
• File taxes.
• Get a chat bot for my stream.
• Write a better chat bot, or modify one.
• Set up a stream schedule.
• Stick to said schedule.
• Set up a streaming related email address.
• Set up a Paypal account.
• Set up donations.
• Work on developing and implementing more board gaming streams.
• Buy a better video card.
• Buy a solid state drive.
• A better 'break' screen.
• Generic layout for 4x3 games.
• Generic layout for 16x9 games.
• An offline screen.
• A better stream profile header.
• Verify Youtube account.
• Set up a time each week to make highlights/export to Youtube.
• Join a streaming team?
• Restart SNES Saturday.
• Come up with a cute/cool/catchy name for viewers/supporters.
• Configure a Discord server.
• Investigate small business loans/subsidies.
• Define rules for chat.
• Figure out what to do about chat mods.
• Decide on a hair style.
• Get hair cut/shave.
• Exercise more than not at all.
• Investigate lighting/lenses to reduce glare on my glasses on camera.
• Figure out how to mix sounds so I'm not streaming everything I hear.
• Curate a playlist of 'go fast' songs.
• And one of 'not blocked' songs.
• And one of 'non-lyrical background' songs.
• And one of just plain awesome songs.
• Make a better 'games I play' profile section.
• Hook up my SNES to my capture card.
• Possibly get a powered splitter for the SNES.
• Figure out how to make my new headphones not cause pain when they press into my glasses.
• Find something I'm willing to drink while streaming that isn't pop.

More to be added later, I'm sure, but that's a start. Some of those I've somehow managed to get done in the last 6 months, but actually not very many of them. My birthday is on Sunday and I'd like to do something special (24 hour stream or something maybe) but I need to get some more of this stuff done first. Especially setting up the ability to accept donations since if I'm going to be a busker I really do need to get a guitar case open on the sidewalk.

Path of Exile: Patch 2.1

I haven't played Path of Exile since September 2014 when I hurt my wrist playing the game. I was really pushing to try to win a t-shirt and ended up putting too much strain on my wrist. This apparently combined with anxiety issues (presumably about becoming homeless) to make my hand go numb. But that issue got dealt with via drugs and I've been pretty capable of streaming games for 12+ hours a day without hurting my wrist. I definitely don't want to play super hardcore to win a t-shirt or anything, but I think I can play the game again without hurting myself.

There have been a lot of patches in the last 15 months, with a big one launching today. So many things have changed in the game, and they sound really, really good. Standard things like a new act, tons of new items, better balance... But also some other cool stuff...

An item filter so you can write a text file to alter what loot you see on the ground. You can change font sizes, colours, and add sound effects!

An experience per hour meter!

Revamped map system which keeps all the cool things with end game maps while extending and enhancing things to make them better for more casual play. Map pools are easier to build up at lower levels, and harder at very high levels, but the high maps are worth it.

A card collecting system to trade cards for loot at a vendor, so you can farm specific areas to get specific useful unique items.

Skill gems you can get from quests are sold from vendors so you don't need to create alts or store tons of gems in a guild bank anymore!

Even more customization in the sphere grid system, with new jewels you can stick in the grid!

Integration with Twitch so stream chat is a channel in the game client!


It remains to be seen how good this stuff actually is, but I have really high hopes. I don't intend on playing nearly as much as I used to, but maybe if they still have races and stuff I can get into streaming it... We'll see!

Rocket League

Rocket League is an online MOBA game where you drive around in a car, with a rocket strapped to the back of it, and play soccer. It seems to have pretty good physics for a rocket boosted car game... At the very least it seems to be consistent! So even if it isn't 'realistic' for the real world, it feels realistic for the Rocket League world.

Ike is always on the lookout for games we can stream together, and he really wanted to get into Rocket League. I wasn't sure it was for me, but mostly I wasn't sure the price tag was for me. But then Ike was awesome and gave me a copy of the game on Steam. Hurray! I ran through the tutorials and was pretty bad, but it was fun.

Last night after my WoW raid I played some games with Snuggles, Sceadeau, and one of Sceadeau's friends. The game plays up to 4v4, and we were pretty terrible, but it was really fun. We played for close to 3 hours all told and there were noticeable improvements in both our mechanics and our strategy. Still really bad, but not quite as bad as at the start!

I watched Witwix playing H1Z1 this morning, and then he finished his stream by playing Rocket League. It was like he was playing an entirely different game! My tactics pretty much boiled down to driving fast near the ball and hoping it did good things if I hit it... He was able to do these jumping dashing hits that actually made the ball move fast, and in a planned direction! Definitely some more practice will be needed... But it seems to have a reasonable matchmaking system, so even if I always suck I should just play against other people who suck and then we can have fun driving around near the ball!

One big plus the game has is you only play a 5 minute game with almost instant queue times to get into the next game. So even if you start getting blown out, the game is almost over! It's not like some LoL games where it's obvious you've lost in 6 minutes but have to play for another 20+ minutes until the game actually ends.

It's definitely worth checking out if the idea of car soccer sounds interesting.

World of Warcraft: Back to Raiding

A couple weeks ago I was thinking about games I'd played in the past that I wish I'd streamed. World of Warcraft was the first one that jumped to mind. Having a recording of how I'd played undoubtedly would have been good for getting better, and it would also be nice to have things like Tribute to Dedicated Insanity up on Youtube to be able to watch and reminisce about years in the future. The very next day Sky put up a post on his blog about differences in recruiting in his current guild and in the one we used to run back in the day.

WoW also recently went free to play. Well, not exactly, but pretty close. Instead of paying a monthly fee you can choose to sell some gold to another player, through Blizzard, and they pay your monthly fee for you. I have more gold on my account than I know what to do with so resubscribing with gold doesn't cost me much of anything at all. So I can try to get back into raiding without a monetary cost...

{As an aside, Blizzard still owes me around 400k gold from when my account was hacked. Now that that amount is over a year and a half of subscription fees I can't imagine ever getting it back, but it just makes getting hacked all the more annoying.}

Sky went and cleared it with his guild leader that streaming is allowed in his guild, so I've been working on getting my gear to a state where I can plausibly raid without just being a drag on things. I did some reading on rotations and stats and such and I'm pretty ready now, so tonight I'm going to try streaming a raid at 9:30 AST.

I normally prefer to tank things, but coming in super undergeared and not knowing any of the fights means I'm going to be a beatdown DK at least to start. And maybe the whole time? The way flexible raids work really make it seem like extra DPSers is fine, but extra tanks aren't needed unless old tanks cut back on play time. But that's just fine by me, as I've liked beating down too.

I will say, I've only been back playing for a week and I'm already sick of both LFR and Ashran. The queue times for both are really long for a DPSer and the gameplay in both just isn't very interesting. But they both provide a way to bootstrap my gear, so I felt obligated to do them. I'm about done with both of them now though, I think...

Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

Ike and I have been looking for a game we could stream together. I was watching Witwix a couple days ago and he was talking about how he had a 24 hour stream planned for Friday since that was the start of the new season for Diablo III. I haven't played any of the expansion at all yet, so 'new season' didn't mean all that much to me, but it felt like it might be a game Ike and I could play co-op. I suggested it to Ike, he tested to make sure his computer could handle streaming it, and it looks like we're good to go.

As I said, I don't have the expansion, and I wasn't really looking forward to paying Blizzard $40 for it. I did some searching around and found a bunch of different websites that sell keys for games. Initially this feels really sketchy. Have these sites cracked the key generation code and are just manufacturing keys? Did they buy a ton of keys from a country where the game is cheaper? Hack accounts in some way? Are they just scamming entirely?

Then there is the other option, which is that Blizzard is just engaging in variable pricing. Micro economics does say that the seller would ideally like to sell their product for the maximum amount of money to each individual buyer. But they can't well have on their website a button to buy a game for $40 and a button to buy the same game for $20. It's easy to make a more expensive button with a sound track or whatnot, but they'd likely lose more money from $40 people switching to $20 then they would gain from additional $20 sales. What they could do is sell keys to resellers for $20 and then let them mark them up a little bit and sell to the people unwilling to pay $40.

I then noticed that one of the key reseller sites sponsors the pro gaming team Cloud 9, which is my favourite NA LCS team. My favourite Hearthstone streamer, Hafu, is also on Cloud 9, and has an ad on her stream for the key reseller with a small discount code. So they're probably not straight up scammers, I would hope? There's certainly a spectrum of options for how they got their keys and some of them are pretty reasonable to support.

The bottom line is that if I was currently employed I'd just click the button on Blizzard's website and pay whatever they want to charge. But as things currently stand saving $20 is worth the risk of not knowing exactly how G2A gets their keys. So I snapped yesterday and finally picked up the D3 expansion.

I tried playing a bit, but everything is completely changed from the game I used to know. I have no idea what my old level 60 character's build should be, or if the gear she has is useful or not. But that's what a new season is for! Paragon points and stash and crafters and everything is completely wiped out for characters created in the new season.

So tonight Ike and I are going to try streaming from 10pm-midnight atlantic time. I'm going to try out the new class in the expansion, crusader, and I think Ike is going to shoot things from afar with a demon hunter. I don't know anything about what classes might be good or not except that Witwix said every 4 person group 'needs' a '0 DPS' witch doctor for some reason. I've never played any witch doctor at all... If I end up wanting to play without Ike then maybe I'll start one of those and try out public groups if those are a thing?

ALL the Achievements?!?

I finally found the last two items in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and have now unlocked all 178 achievements for the game. It may come as a bit of a surprise, but this is actually the first game in which I've earned all the achievements. I really like trying to get achievements which is why it seems so weird to me that I've never gotten them all in any game before. Why is that?

Surely the biggest part is that official achievements only came into existence a fair bit into my gaming life. If Krusty's Super Fun House on the SNES had achievements I surely would have earned them all. I likely would have picked up all the achievements in a variety of older RPGs too. The SNES and PSX era Final Fantasy games in particular, but even something like The 7th Saga or Wizardry V I probably would have gotten them all if they existed.

And then once achievements started becoming a thing I spent the vast majority of my gaming time playing either World of Warcraft or League of Legends. LoL has no achievements at all, and WoW has way too many achievements! I have an awful lot of them, including some stupidly hard/crazy ones, but getting them all would have required being really dedicated at all aspects of the game. And ditching my guild for one that ran 25 mans.

I found a website a while ago that tracks Steam achievements. I now have fully completed 1.2% of the games in my Steam library that have achievements. But 47.1% of the games are sitting at 0% achievements! That's sure showing how many games I haven't even gotten around to installing. And that still leaves 51.8% of my library that I started but never finished getting all the achievements.

It has me wondering if maybe I should work on completing some more games? Having some direction could help with forcing myself to stream more, too. Maybe spend a day or two per week solely streaming achievement earning runs of things? It would also be a good excuse to replay some very good games, like Alan Wake and DmC. But I don't know that achievement farming would make for terribly interesting content...

But hey, at least now I can say I'm a REAL platinum god!

Streaming Hours

Back at the end of last month I told myself this month I'd put more hours into streaming. You never know how things will go unless you actually just try it out, right? A lot of the advice I've heard on random streams I watch has to do with just putting in time at the start to see what works for you, but you need to actually put in enough time to give repeat viewers a chance to come back. And at the start of the month I actually had one guy who was showing up every day. Pretty much because I was the only English speaking person playing Isaac while this kid was getting ready for school, but that's at least a start, right? I haven't actually seen him in a while. (Turns out he unfollowed me at some point?) But since I haven't really been streaming lately I can't really say I blame him...

I have started tracking hours put in, and I have 3 weeks worth of data now...



So on only 3 days in the last 3 months did I put in even close to a 'full day' of streaming. People talk about streaming 12+ hours a day every day for months in order to build up a viewer base. These three weeks are clearly nowhere near that level so it really isn't surprising that I have a total of 18 followers.

The question now is... Can I do better? What things were keeping me from streaming more this month and what can be done to overcome them?

The first is health related. I went to the doctor on the 13th and he doubled my Paxil dose. When I first switched to Paxil in January I ended up sleeping a lot and being rather lightheaded for a couple weeks. (I believe this was a large contributing factor to my collapsing in the hospital shortly after the switch.) So it isn't too surprising that doubling the dose has caused me to feel pretty similar. I've been sleeping a lot the last couple weeks (probably closer to 12 hours per day instead of 8) and have really not felt up to doing much of anything but sitting in a chair vegging out most of the time. Putting in effort to talk about what games I'm playing hasn't really been something I've felt up to doing.

How can this be fixed? Well, presumably my body will eventually adjust to this dosage and I'll be back to sleeping 8 hours every 26 hours. That'll free up more time each day which could help. I could also stop worrying about being 'on' when I stream and just turn my mic off some of the time. I'm not sure if that would be a net positive or not, but it would certainly help bump the hours number up. And while just inflating the numbers may not be a good thing it could well lead to good things in the long run. It's like when I was really working on getting better at League of Legends and focused just on last hitting. Even if I was worse in those games in the short run I ended up locking in a skill that could be used later on.

Next is how much time I spend watching streams instead of streaming myself. One comment I've heard from multiple streamers is how rarely they actually get to watch streams. People keep asking them for advice about other people to watch and they can't really say. When you're spending 12 hours a day playing The Binding of Isaac you probably don't have much desire to watch other people play it. And even if you did, when would you do it? You need to eat and sleep and maybe interact with other people every now and then!

I do think watching some streams is still very important for me. I watch for entertainment, but also to see how different people do different things. I'm also learning how to be better at Hearthstone in particular by watching top tier players who explain what they're doing some of the time. Even just being able to watch how different matchups play out without having to own the decks myself is quite helpful.

On the other hand, I've been spending a fair amount of time lately watching Hafu play League of Legends and that isn't really helping much at all. She's one of the best Hearthstone drafters in the world with a really popular stream so watching that has been a big net gain I think. But she's about as good at LoL as I was when I played a lot, and she rarely explains anything about what she's doing. There's certainly still entertainment value in it, don't get me wrong... But if I'm looking at time I'm spending on not-streaming that I could easily convert to time spent on streaming these hours would be a good place to start.

And then there's the pro streams I watch. The LoL LCS regular season, IEM tournaments for LoL and Starcraft 2, random Hearthstone tournaments, Vintage super league... Stuff I watch because I really like watching people who are trying to be the absolute best at something. I don't want to cut that stuff out, though I have realized lately that I actually do a lot of gaming while watching those streams. I killed Mom's heart on hardmode with all the characters while watching LCS. I'd pause and watch during interesting stuff, but when a game got out of hand or when it was talking heads I could just play Isaac and listen in the background.

If I could figure out a way to stream a game without streaming the audio from a stream I'm watching then I could keep doing the same sort of thing. But otherwise I just need to prioritize what I watch to not take up 8+ hours in a day. That shouldn't be that hard? Maybe?

I've also been a little leery about what I stream. Games I know reasonably well, sure. But what about completely new stuff? Why would anyone want to watch me learn to play Terraria? Well, why would anyone want to watch me play anything?

The answer here really is that I don't need to know why anyone wants to do anything. Just do some things! I'll never understand people with my current level of knowledge, so trying to figure out things from ignorance is a silly thing to do. Just trying things can only result in more information to possibly make better decisions in the future.

There's also some data issues with my chart because I stream at weird hours and I'm assigning the entirety of a stream to whatever day Twitch archives assigns to the video. So on days when I sleep in the middle of the day it's possible that if I started streaming at 11:50pm the previous day that the day would have no hours even if I went 12 or more. But realistically that would just make the previous day huge and I could just run weekly averages to help deal with that. Clearly this isn't what's actually making my numbers low, it's just a way for perfectionist me to get bitter and give up. Bad perfectionist me! Bad!


Anyway... More things to think about, but I think the core thing is to just work on mindlessly watching fewer streams and just stream more random stuff for a while and see what happens.

Finding a Niche

I've put more of a focus on streaming this month but mostly it's been me playing games by myself or (since I connected with Twitter and Facebook) with Lino watching. This morning I had a random guy come in and chat a bit while I was trying to unlock the Lost in Isaac. The following line in particular is intriguing...

'I was looking through the streams for a person i could hear, who spoke english, who i could understand, and who was obviously commentating'

And there we have it. I futzed around with my microphone settings again yesterday to make it so that I could be heard and suddenly I'm the guy on Twitch who speaks English in the wee hours of the morning. Kids who get up and want something to watch before they go to school can tune in to see me because there are no other options!

He followed me and actually came back to watch me play some Hearthstone after school got out.

I still have problems understanding why anyone would actually want to watch me, but I guess when the bar is set at 'speaks English' I can get on board. Huzzah!

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Tomorrow will feature the second race in the series of three being put on by the speedrun racing site SpeedRunsLive. The whole thing is flying under the banner of 'get yourself speedrunning' and I was really hoping these races would exist to help bootstrap people into speedrunning, but it turns out that isn't really the case. Anyone can create a race in SRL for pretty much any game as long as they have an opponent lined up so the only things that actually seem special about these races are that they have a scheduled start time and there's a stream running with commentary on the top players.

What I was hoping would happen would be that there'd be a lot of information easily available to let people know what sorts of things they should be doing in these games. A 'cheat sheet' if you will of the core tricks to the game and a sample route to follow. The Mario 3 one eventually had a route put up in a pastebin document. It was a good start, but there was no mention that such a thing existed on the website or in the main IRC channel. Or if there was I sure didn't see it. I only found out it existed when I joined the race specific channel an hour before it started and the link was in the topic. I didn't set aside any time to practice but part of that was not knowing what I should even be practicing. If I'd had that document in advance I'd have been more encouraged to at least do a trial run.

I have done some research and practice for the Zelda race. It's much shorter than the Mario 3 race (it only covers the very start of the game up until you get the Master Sword which is right after the 3 pendant dungeons) which is nice. But I wasn't sure what I could or should be doing. The rules for the race are rather cryptic to the uninitiated: 


Rules: S&Q allowed. Glitches banned: EG, YBA, OoB.

Ok... What is S&Q? What is EG? YBA? OoB? What run should I watch to model my game after? Are they abiding by those rules?

S&Q it turns out is the 'Save & Quit' option in the game. This lets you essentially teleport to any of the starting locations in the game which is rather convenient once you've finished a dungeon. Instead of walking to the next dungeon you warp back to your house and take the shorter route. It's not clear to me why people would run without using this option but apparently people do.

OoB stands for Out of Bounds. EG stands for Exploration Glitch. YBA stands for Yuzuhara's Bottle Adventure. All three are ways to skip past large chunks of the game. OoB is clipping through walls to take shortcuts. EG is an extreme form of OoB where you end up getting onto another layer entirely. This lets you walk anywhere on the map. Different dungeons and stuff are all actually just on one big map in memory (or two?) so with this glitch you can pretty much walk to anywhere you want as long as the destination has a way to end the glitch (a cliff of some sort to jump down I think). YBA is a crazy glitch where you use a potion in a bottle on a screen transition to rewrite stuff in memory to do all kinds of crazy things. Like getting the flute well before you should have it, which lets you warp to places you shouldn't be able to reach.

So basically they're banning all the things that let you skip parts of the game. Sort of like how in Mario 3 they banned the warp whistle but still let you use p-wings and clouds to skip/cheat your way through individual levels. With a whistle you skip entire worlds in one action and that's not good for a nostalgia run. In Zelda they ban all the weird glitches but they let you warp back to your starting point. That only cuts out some boring running around on the world map.

I couldn't find any routes for this category anywhere so what I did was watched a bunch of different videos people had posted for categories that sounded like they could be this one. They had enough similarities that I got a pretty good idea of what I'd need to do. Because you aren't using any crazy glitches you need to do the dungeons in order. You need the running boots from dungeon one to knock down the book to enter dungeon two. You need the gloves from dungeon two to pick up a rock on the way to dungeon three. Then the only thing left to do is run into the forest and pick up the sword. I saw one guy who went and got an optional ice rod to help kill the bosses but most people skipped that. It seemed like the only optional thing most people did was pick up the heart from a chest in the sanctuary you take Zelda to at the start of the game.

There are still all sorts of tricks to cut frames out by walking on some diagonals and people plan out specific arrow usages so they know how many pots they need to pick up. I'm a bad aim so I need to pick up all the arrows I can find!

I did a test run this morning and got done in a little over an hour. Real people finish in 23 minutes (or maybe less now... who knows how good the people I watched actually are) so this was already a better ratio than my Mario 3 run. And I got lost lots, and got knocked out of the third boss fight several times. I expect to do much better in the actual race.

And maybe they're intentionally making it hard to find this stuff. That's what speedrunning is... Find different tricks and glitches from a wide variety of sources and watch the people who claim to be good to see what they do. Try to copy it. When you're good enough to do what they do then you can tinker with ways to make it faster by doing different things. Which you either find yourself through insane amounts of trial and error or you find by watching other people in the hopes they stumble across something new.

I'm definitely going to get up in time for the Zelda race tomorrow. But after how much effort it took this week to find what I needed to do in a game I understand I feel like trying for the Sonic one next week is probably crazy. Maybe I could show up and expect to come last? I don't want to show up and end up forfeiting though, so that may well come down to if I think I'll be awake for 6+ hours after it starts.

I may even practice more in the morning... I didn't get any ranking points for coming 91st in Mario 3, but I feel like I could probably do well enough in Zelda to get some ranking points. Assuming as many random new players show up as last time, anyway! I don't think ranking points really do anything but they're a number that I could make get bigger, so I must make it bigger!

What People Watch

For the last week or so I've been putting a lot of thought into what people actually want to watch. I had a couple 'random' people show up to watch me stream Binding of Isaac. I'm not very good at that game. I like playing it, and I win some of the time, but I'm nowhere near as good as the people I've seen who are doing speed runs or no reset hard mode Eden streaks. One of the guys I watch can recite the exact stats of every item when he picks it up! I struggle to remember approximately what most of the things do. I wouldn't want to watch me play Isaac, not compared to some of the other options that are out there. Yet one of those random people came back on a later day looking for more.

Recently I had an article linked to me about YouTube revenue stats. The top earner last year brought in almost 5 million dollars just from ad revenue. She has 3.5 million subscribers and her videos have almost 4.8 BILLION views. What does she do in these videos? Open Disney branded children's toys. The description sounded pretty banal to me so I went and watched one of them. It really was just a set of hands working to pull a toy set out of the packaging. The commentary assumed a certain level of familiarity with Disney movies and toys but seemed to do a good job of explaining the bits. She even made some extra dresses for some of the dolls out of Play-Doh.

I don't get it. But then I realized that in order to watch that video I had to mute a stream I was watching of some guy who was good but not great at HearthStone. I'm sure a lot of the people interested in watching dolls get taken out of the packaging wouldn't find an online CCG to be terribly compelling. And probably a fair number of the people who watch The Bachelor or Monday Night Football wouldn't understand what the doll packaging people or the Hearthstone people find compelling about their chosen content either. Heck, my mother watches people make stuff with looms!

This isn't to say that the people who like watching Disney toys get unboxed are bad in any way. It's just that I personally don't understand the appeal of it. I never in a million years would have thought to tape myself opening boxes and then make millions of dollars each year. Now there's absolutely a ton of other work that went into this particular lady's success I'm sure. Marketing and production values and having a consistent brand image and a ton of work setting stuff up. For that matter I don't understand how someone can just play Final Fantasy games and get paid a reasonable amount of cash but that's exactly what the two guys in the Final Fantasy Month did. In that case they've actually been averaging more than 10 hours a day every single day for almost 2 months now... So if they make 6k doing it that's a fine thing. Not millions, but also not needing to eat just noodles every day. But even then... I was watching these guys play but I still didn't pay them any money. I didn't watch any ads. I'm not sure what they could do to have me want to throw some money their way. But plenty of other people did!

I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't understand people at all. I have a hard enough time trying to understand why I want to watch the things I want to watch. Trying to figure out what other people will watch is an unfathomable mystery...


I've been told a couple times now that I could probably get a reasonably popular stream going if I worked at it. What would need to be worked on is certainly a matter of debate though. Do I need to be willing to talk to most of the people in chat? Some of them? Any of them at all? Would I need to be a jerk? My brother seemed to think that getting up to legend status in Hearthstone would bring in lots of people. Keeping them would be a different matter, but at least that would be an initial hook.

But if I don't know what other people want to watch then how would I actually make a plan to broadcast something they want? Copy someone else's model maybe? Try a whole bunch of things and hope something randomly sticks? Just do stuff I'd want to see? But even if I could figure out what I personally wanted there's no reason to assume many other people would want the same thing. And even if they did... Someone who thinks like me isn't going to be generating any revenue for anyone anyway.

I don't have any solutions here, but I'm going to keep running things over in my head as I watch other people. Hopefully just going through the process of typing things out will have put some of these ideas in a better order for my brain to sort out while I sleep.

Final Fantasy II: Trial Start

I went and spent 5 hours tonight streaming the start of a Final Fantasy II run. It didn't exactly go according to plan but I learned some things. I also talked a bit about Final Fantasy games with a 13 year old who randomly decided to watch me because he played FFII on the GBA. Anyway, here's what I learned...

- Even with 16 sword skill you actually need a good sword to do any damage. The enemy's armour applies to each hit so the fact I'm swinging with a 8 attack sword means any enemy with something like 20 armour is immune to my damage. For the record, the Captain I need to grind for a toad book has 50 armour.

- I leveled a fire spell to 10 in order to kill the Captain, but it really didn't do a whole lot of damage. Something like 280 to a single target. I also tried using it against some powerful undead I ran into near Mysidia and it was hitting them all for about 120 each. The ghost had 540 health so it was taking 5 casts to kill them off. That is not fast. Even if I leveled fire all the way to 16 it would be doing less than 200 on average to all enemies. So 3 casts to take out the ghosts. And there are other undead with even more health than ghosts. The damage from my fire is pretty much capped, too, unless I put even more time and effort into grinding my int stat.

- Toad actually took out some enemies despite casting it with a sword and shield on. This confused me. It hit some and missed others of the same type so it isn't that they're vulnerable to the element. I was able to land it despite having 120% accuracy penalty from my sword and shield. It just doesn't make sense. My chance to hit while naked should only be around 50%! (Though toad 16 does try to hit 16 times which means it really will hit everything when I have 50% chance to hit.) My best guess is that the accuracy penalty was removed in this version of the game. Possibly drastically reduced? And that the enemies I didn't hit with toad rolled high on their magic resist checks and I rolled abysmally low on my toad checks? That doesn't feel very good, but it feels better than hitting with a spell that has a -70% chance to hit. Or maybe there's some underflow error going on?

- Toad 16 and the snowcraft did combine to get me an aegis shield and a ribbon pretty early on. No enemies that I would legitimately encounter on the way to this point in the game cast dangerous debuffs so the ribbon here doesn't come too late.

- I had serious money trouble. Especially when I got Mindu and started grinding up magic points. But I was able to kill some enemies near Mysidia for a lot of cash, and that's not very far from the starting town. So if I have a way to kill them I might try grinding down there instead.

- I wanted to get toad on my first trip to the castle but I really only see one way to make that happen, and that's to level unarmed skill. You get 8 damage for each level in unarmed, so if I grind that up to level 16 I'd get to swing 16 times for something close to 200 per swing. 50 armour doesn't do anything relevant against that! It adds another thing to grind, which sucks, but since fire really isn't cutting it for killing undead I can just skip grinding that? Alternatively the Fynn castle isn't very far from the starting town so I can just go get toad after I do some plot and level up organically along the way?

- I got my evade chance up to 99% pretty easily, but I only had 1 chance to evade. This wasn't good since the Captain swings 6 times per attack. I can deal with that by taking the time to grind up my evade chance though. (Equip 2 shields and just mash X to spam attack against a large group of enemies willing to attack you.) This is probably worth my while to do regardless.

- It was weird, but I couldn't get a full level in a spell in one combat. I could take sword skill up a full 100 experience and gain a level in one fight but the spells were all capping out in the high 90s. eventually I resorted to doing half a level in each fight to level up my toad spell.

- Counting to 100 is easy if I focus on it. Counting to 100 while reading chat and responding is tricky.

- It felt like I was still getting ambushed more often than I thought I should. It's possible I want 99% evade on all my characters, even the dead ones. This wouldn't actually take very long. Level 10 shield skill and two of the second shield would do it. Assuming I had the money to buy them!

I'm now torn on if I should continue from my saved game to see what other issues I run into or if I should start a new plan from the beginning since this start really isn't great. I guess I could just grind unarmed skill in my current game to emulate what I'll probably want to do? That way I can see problems that crop up later while having unarmed skill to actually kill enemies with armour.

I'm also torn on if I want one character to grind unarmed for early game and swords for late game or if I want two different characters to grind each one. Only having one character taking actions felt really good... So I think I want to stick with that for now.

Talking To Strangers

I was streaming some Binding of Isaac runs earlier today when a random dude started watching. He chatted a bit, and I used IRC to chat back. I'd muted my mic after testing that it worked the other day and didn't feel like turning it back on. The random dude eventually lamented the fact that I didn't have a mic and when I didn't turn my mic on he unfollowed me and left.

I could have just turned on my mic and talked to the dude. Frankly, it sort of seems like the whole point of the setup. But it was hard enough just bringing myself to type to the guy. The idea of straight up talking to him, especially by needing to take an extra step and turn on my mic, freaked me out.

It probably doesn't help that I have no idea how this guy found me or why he wanted to talk to me of all people. Looking at the main Twitch site now I see that The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is actually the 7th most popular game being watched, at almost double StarCraft 2. That's crazy! Though I guess I did buy the game by watching someone streaming it on Twitch, so maybe it's just a viral effect going on.

I know nothing bad will happen if I talk to people. I know it's a good idea to socialize even a little bit. But knowing it and doing it are very different things. I guess I'll just keep at it and see what happens.

Final Fantasy Month

One of the people I'm following on Twitch started up a long race with another guy where they're going to play 21 Final Fantasy games one after another and see who can beat them all first. They're pausing their times when they're sleeping so you can compare the different games between the two of them. Cereth, who I watch with some regularity, actively speedruns 5 of the games on the list. Crumps only speedruns 2 of them. So he should be at a big disadvantage... But apparently Cereth hasn't ever played some of the games and is likely to lose a fair amount of time on those. Especially since one of them is Tactics and a lot of people I know have to completely scrap their first run of that game because it encourages you to save the game right before a brutally hard fight. This means there's no way to go power up... So if you can't win with what you have, and if you don't have a backup save... You're screwed!

They're playing Final Fantasy II now, which neither of them have played much in the past, though at least Crumps is casting berserk to be awesome. One of the things mentioned on the stream is how the game actually has no RTA record time... No one speed runs this thing. Not even once just to get their name in lights... And the split software I use has a lot of game names preprogrammed into it. A _lot_ of game names. Including every single Final Fantasy game, except FFII. Poor FFII.

When I played this game in my marathon, way back in 2011, I didn't know what to do to make the game interesting so I decided to try to beat it as fast as I could. I got done in a little under 16 hours, but I spent a lot of time actually learning how the game works. And given that my raising agility post is one of the few that actually gets hits from outside people I know I think I actually have a pretty high level of knowledge about this game. I also didn't abuse the cancel trick in my last playthrough and that's certainly kosher in a speedrun.

What I'm saying is, I think I could really shave the time down to the level where it would be 'easy' to play the game in one sitting. And seeing all these people tuning in to watch these guys play the game makes me think there may be interest from other people in seeing it done.

I set up my PS2 today, and hooked it up to my USB capture card, and tried setting up a stream from it. I think it's pretty obvious from the quality that I'm using just composite cables instead of s-video since I don't have that wire for my PS2. If I actually get anywhere with doing this I'll have to track a better wire down. But what I do have seemed to be fairly clear regardless, so the technical setup is in place. The next step would be planning out a path through the game (including what chests are worth picking up) and then figuring out how twinked out I have to be to plow through that path. And then grind it up!

It feels a little bad to be deviating from my marathon to go do something else, but whatever! Tactics Advance is not the best so I'm in a bit of a rut anyway.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

I've been watching a lot of streams over the past month what with my hands hurting sporadically. One of the games that cropped up recently among people I follow on Twitch and on people who stream through SpeedRunsLive is The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. It's an action RPG roguelike game with a bunch of challenge modes built into it. It looked pretty fun, and it looked like the sort of thing I could be reasonably good at, and since it's so new it's also something that people are racing a lot. Getting a stream listed on the SRL stream list requires having done some races on their site, so picking up a shorter game with an active userbase seemed like a decent thing to do. So when it went on sale this past weekend I picked it up to give it a spin.

The game has a 'bit' of a sacrilegious theme going on. You play the role of Isaac, a small child whose mother hears the voice of God command her to sacrifice Isaac. Rather than allow yourself to be murdered you escape through a trap door into the basement which is a randomly generated dungeon crawl. Your method of attacking is to cry at the enemies, which shoots little projectile tears at them. The game controls like Robotron with a double joystick setup. One joystick for moving, one for aiming your attack.

The key to the game is the wide array of items you can pick up which modify the way the game plays out. The items can combine in weird and crazy ways and a good part of the fun, so far at least, has been in seeing the changes to the character as you stack on more and more weird modifications. One of the ways to get new items, including most of the powerful ones, is to meet with Satan and exchange maximum health for power. He can teach you how to fly, or turn your tears into molten lava, or maybe just sell you a headless baby corpse which will follow you round leaking blood in a trail behind you. He's a good guy who just wants to give you the tools you need to survive!

The enemies are pretty silly, too. Flies, and spiders, and sentient piles of poop. Lots of the items center around poop, actually. There's definitely some juvenile humour going on, but if you take the theme away you're still left with a fairly short dungeon crawler that controls fantastically and has a lot of interesting decisions when it comes to what items you want to buy.

I'm having a lot of fun with it, and I'm throwing it up on stream when I can. It's worth checking out if the theme doesn't bother you too much. I have to unlock a lot of stuff before I can think about racing the game (typical races go to a level of the dungeon I can't play) but that's definitely still a relatively short term goal.

More On Streaming

I followed up my test stream on Tuesday with another test stream on Wednesday. I want to post a bit about what I learned in the process and what may be next.

First things first though, I should actually link my Twitch account in a post in case anyone who wanted to find it missed when I posted it in the comments earlier this week. http://www.twitch.tv/thegreatziggyny Ideally I would have used the name Ziggyny to keep my 'brand' constant, whatever that would mean. But it turns out that account is already taken, by someone who has never streamed anything. I actually suspect the Ziggyny account was created by me, on Justin.tv, to watch an MLG quite a few years ago. Twitch merged with Justin or something, at least they absorbed the accounts, and I suspect my ability to get back into that account got broken in the process. TheGreatZiggyny has been my general fallback name forever, but it may be a little over pompous for something I actually use. Or maybe I just need to go all in and get a top hat and cape to run with it.

I looked into Twitch chat and it is just an IRC server with channels named by the Twitch account name. So irc.twitch.tv/6667 channel #thegreatziggyny is my chat channel. They have an authentication token thing setup so you need a special password to login to the IRC server so there were some hoops to jump through to get setup, but now that I've done it it's done. Putting the chat on the stream itself is as easy as running an IRC client and using the streaming software (OBS) to capture from that window. I watched a video from someone about how to set up transparencies such that I made the colour black in the IRC source into transparent so I can have chat overlayed onto a game if I so desired.

I couldn't find a place where I was happy to overlay chat in SolForge so I just broke the screen up and shrunk the SolForge window for my test. To add to the test and fill space I stuck in the time splits I built for Final Fantasy Mystic Quest back in January. Supposedly there's a plug-in to connect LiveSplit with OBS but I just added it as an extra source to capture for now. It seemed to have worked reasonably well regardless. Except that I was using Mystic Quest splits for SolForge which makes no sense at all.

The layout sure wasn't pretty, but it was reasonably functional and as far as a test goes it was definitely a success.

I didn't look into it very hard, but I couldn't figure out how to limit which sounds got broadcast. I did find a way to turn down the music volume though so that I could play something for background noise while playing SolForge (which has no music, or I found the music annoying and turned it off). I don't think I quite got it quiet enough, or maybe I just need to speak up more, but it worked well enough. Good proof of concept like the layout I guess.

My computer was pretty good when I built it 5ish years ago, but it may be a little outdated now. Or perhaps more likely Flash is just a poorly optimized CPU hog. I had to close Chrome and FireFox to not have my CPU grind to a halt while streaming. (Though I also was trying out streaming to disk at the same time as to Twitch and that probably didn't help.) Closing my web browsers meant I couldn't log in to Twitch to mess with settings (like the stream name) while actually streaming. This actually seems like a fairly common complaint. So much so that people have created tools to interface with Twitch without having to open a web browser. I downloaded one of those (TeeBoard) after my last test. Something to play around with next time I guess.

As far as next time goes I want to try streaming something more CPU intensive like League of Legends. I also want to try streaming something off of my SNES. I got my TV bench put together this afternoon so I should be able to get myself setup with my TV to give that a spin. I would have already tried a LoL stream except my right arm has been hurting again. Really all I've been doing is watching streams (DreamHack Winter is on this weekend) and clicking heroes with my left hand. And I really can't imagine a Clicker Heroes stream as being interesting to anyone so it didn't seem worth it to even try such a thing.

Streaming Test: Success?

Back in January I tried to stream from my apartment in Toronto with no success. My internet didn't have a high enough upload bandwidth which caused me to drop all the frames. The game also lagged massively which may or may not have been related, or it may have been a CPU issue with LoL and all the things I had open. It wasn't worth looking into since I couldn't possibly stream with my internet as it was. I wanted to get it fixed, but I was too averse to talking to people to call up Rogers.

I'm now living in Riverview, and while it's still on Rogers it's a much better connection. My upload in Toronto was 450K when you need 1.5M to stream at a minimum. I was supposed to have 2M, but the connection sucked. Here we're supposed to get 10M and I actually get 11M, so huzzah! (Interestingly, my mother had to call Rogers to change plans so that we'd have a bigger download cap, and it turns out she was also grandfathered into an old, expensive plan. So the internet got faster, with a massively larger download cap, and was $6 cheaper. I hate people.

Anyway, I now have enough upload bandwidth to try streaming again. My right arm started acting up again the last couple days so I didn't want to try with LoL... I fell back to the game I was playing a lot when I hurt my wrist in the first place: SolForge! A nice, slow card game where I can click with my left hand just fine.

I ran into some issues with the game lagging out, but Chrome and Firefox were eating up a ton of CPU usage. I shut those down and pretty much just left OBS, SolForge, and chat programs open. That sped things back up fine, and I was actually able to get something out. I had some issues with sound, but I deleted those videos while I figured out what was going on. I'm streaming all sources of sound, it turns out, which meant when I had the stream open I was looping back on myself over and over again. But once I closed Chrome that all went away. I need to figure out a way to only pick up certain audio sources, or I need to figure out a way to get Twitch chat without watching my own stream.

There's got to be a way to do that, since Path of Exile could actually allow chatting on Twitch through their client. I think maybe they're just IRC channels? Something to look up tomorrow I guess!