NOTE: This post originally appeared in my Patreon account on June 6th, 2022
This weekend, I had planned to do a stream of Star Citizen. I actually worked a good part of Saturday just to get my setup going. My mic was working well, but it was a bit oversensitive. I have a pretty decent streaming camera which worked well with Animaze.
The last thing for me to do was to actually launch Star Citizen to reconfigure FOIP - the team had changed it in 3.17 and made serious improvements. But then there was a problem. I couldn't use FOIP in Star Citizen along with Animaze - they simply wouldn't work with each other. From a hardware perspective, only one of those applications could use the camera at time. The thing is that Animaze has an output, but FOIP didn't recognize said output as a face.
Thus, no tracking.
But that's not why I didn't stream. While I was updating my rig and troubleshooting problems, I was thinking about what I was actually creating. And I ultimately came to the conclusion that I wasn't providing anything by streaming. Nothing of substance, in any case.
I could ramble on about my thoughts on politics or writing or whatever while streaming, but that doesn't seem like a lot of fun to me. Or really very informative or entertaining.
If I wasn't going to make any meaningful contribution via streaming, then there wasn't a point in doing it, and instead focusing my attention on the videos. Both were going to be time-consuming regardless, so I figured may as well put my energy into the project that matters more in the long run.
So my mind went back to YouTube. I've honestly wanted to make a channel for a long time. All sorts of channels, really. Gaming, travel, cooking, gardening, etc. That's more my style - making something with more lasting value.
Basically, I'm back to the idea of starting a channel and doing that alongside writing the novels. And that channel wouldn't be gaming, or rather, it would be gaming adjacent. The idea now is to do deep dives on stories and narratives within the games themselves. IE Mass Effect, and the highly contentious ending that IMO few actually understood.
I took a brief look and it seems that there's already a few who do this, with some that're rather stylistic in their approach. I'll have to do a bit more research and see. Otherwise, seems there's room to play.
