#oneaday Day 147: Saturday Night is for Streaming

Well, it is this week, anyway. Andie is going out for a friend’s birthday in the evening, so I thought I might take the opportunity to do a bit of streaming. You, dear reader, are welcome to stop by. Here’s my Twitch channel. I’ll be streaming from about 8pm UK time, all being well, and the duration will depend on how much fun I’m having and whether anyone is actually chatting. I plan to go for at least an hour or two, though.

The game I’ve picked to stream is one I deliberately haven’t started yet. It’s Experience’s dungeon crawler Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters and Gain Strong Weapons and Armor. You May Be Defeated, but Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be a Day When the Heroes Defeat the Devil King. I have picked this for several reasons:

  1. I like Experience games.
  2. I like dungeon crawlers.
  3. It has a silly name.
  4. As I understand it, it’s a fairly light and breezy take on the dungeon crawler, so it should be eminently suitable for chatting while playing.

Now I’m sure anyone who is all about “optimising” their Twitch experience would recommend I play something people have actually heard of. But if you’ve ever paid my YouTube channel a visit you will know that I don’t really give a shit about baiting the algorithm and getting huge viewing figures.

In fact, as I’ve discussed previously, I actually don’t like it when a video does well, because after you crash through a certain number of views, people start to get a bit more mean and I’m not a big fan of that. So I’d rather just host a nice little comfortable stream for friends to drop in on as they see fit — and perhaps a few newcomers can pop along and learn a bit about a game they haven’t seen before alongside me.

Streaming is something that, I know, you have to work hard at in order to get anywhere. To be honest, I’m not so fussed about trying to “make partner” or “go affiliate” or whatever — the thing that appeals to me about streaming more than anything else right now is the prospect of potentially making some human connections with people. I have been so bereft of good company beyond my wife and cats in recent years that I want to try various means of potentially meeting new folks. And streaming would seem like a potentially solid means of discovering people with similar interests that I might get along with.

I know that won’t happen immediately. I’m fine with that. I’ve recorded lots of Let’s Plays for YouTube, so I am intimately familiar with how to talk rubbish entirely to myself while playing a video game. But if some good conversation happens to come about? So much the better. We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, tomorrow evening, 8pm UK time. I’ll let you work out what that is in your region. Let’s hunt some monsters and have a good time!


Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

1048: HELLO

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Hello! I’m back. Yes, it’s me. You know, Pete. The guy who runs this blog. I’m not writing in character or being creative any more. Well, I am being creative. Sort of. Just not in quite the same way I spent the last month. It’s back to my normal ramblings from now.

It occurs to me every so often that I write an absolute buttload of words every day. Seriously, if we could power the world on words, I could probably power a small city on the number of words I produce each day. I don’t have to produce this many words each day, as only a portion of them are for paid employment but, you know, I like it. So I do it in my spare time, too. You probably knew that already, particularly if you’ve been following this blog for even a fraction of the 1,048 days I’ve been writing daily nonsense, or if you’ve been good enough to check out what I’ve been doing with the rest of the team over at Games Are Evil.

Occasionally I get the urge to write something for a purpose a little bit less amorphous than that of this blog, and consider writing a novel, or a game, or something else with lots of words in. Unless I specifically set myself a target, though, those things can and do fall by the wayside. My hard drive and Google Docs account are filled with half-finished (or barely-started) novels; I have at least a few awesome game intros that I’ve made, too. (There’s also one three hour-long game called The Adventures of Dave Thunder that was lost to a catastrophic computer failure a few years back, which I’ve never quite forgiven Sony for, even if it was my own fault for not backing the bastard up.)

Recently, a games writer released a 50,000 word ebook on the subject of a single video game. I’m not a big fan of the writer in question, to be honest — and no, there shall be no bitchy blog post explaining why, they just rub me up the wrong way — so I have very little intention of actually reading (let alone purchasing) said book. However, what I have found is that the mere existence of this ebook has given me a bit of a nudge to start on something that I’ve been considering doing for a while. Said nudge is a result of the ineffable law of Well If They Can Do It I Certainly Can Too combined with the fact that I knocked out over 50,000 words of creative writing over the course of the last month without breaking too much of a sweat. Which is nice.

This is what I’m going to do: I’m going to write a book on the subject of the visual novel medium. Regular readers will know that I’m hugely enamoured with this largely Japanese subgenre of gaming, and you may even check in regularly on my weekly “READ.ME” column on Games Are Evil each Sunday. The visual novel medium has a lot in common with anime, but is very much its own distinct thing. And there are books on anime out there — so why not visual novels?

READ.ME is by far my favourite thing to write each week (scathing reviews of particularly awful mobile apps aside) and thus I figured it’s a natural extension to 1) write more about something that I genuinely love and 2) spend some time delving deeper into the background of the medium and its cultural context. Rather than focusing on a single game for the entire book — which is probably possible in many cases, given the depth of their narratives — I have decided to take a “collected essays” approach in which I tackle a selection of different titles, each of which exemplifies a particular theme, narrative style or tone. This gives me the excuse to play a wide variety of different titles as well as write more about the ones that I’ve already played (and, in some cases, written about) to death. It also means that the complete project can be broken down into smaller, more easily-manageable targets rather than being a single, daunting task.

So yeah. That’s the plan. I’ve already started, having bashed out 2,500 words on Kana Little Sister today (with more to come when I’ve seen its other endings) and lined up several other chapters while their subject matter is fresh in my mind. We’ll see how it goes. To Scrivener!

#oneaday, Day 72: Taking Stock

Okay, so I’m back in the UK. Now what? I kind of haven’t come down off the high from the last few days yet, but I probably should start making some sort of plan to sort out that “future” thing. I hear it helps.

So here’s where I am now. I am going to run down these things in writing in public to see if that helps to take stock of my current situation and give me an idea of where the hell I’m going.

CURRENT EMPLOYMENT STATUS: Writing for Kombo.com. Writing for dailyjoypad.co.uk. Two music pupils, possible third.

EMPLOYMENT ANALYSIS: Not enough to pay rent. Need either a) more pupils b) more writing jobs that pay big bucks (hah!) c) computer pupils as well as music pupils or d) few days of supply teaching per week. I’d rather not have to do d) but it may be a necessity, for a little while at least. Over the next couple of days I am going to set up a new website advertising my computer tuition services and I shall be counting on you (yes, you!) to be part of the pimping process for that. My pupils have found me through the directory on musicteachers.co.uk thus far, but I’m not sure if there’s an equivalent for computer tuition. I guess some research is in order.

CURRENT HEALTH STATUS: Mild sore throat. Unfit. Fat.

HEALTH ANALYSIS: Recommence Operation Gym and Operation Run Without Dying. iPhone is already loaded with an appropriate soundtrack, featuring tunes from Bayonetta, Persona 3, Persona 4, OutRun, Space Channel 5, Trauma Center and various Final Fantasy titles. Get into routine of actually going to gym as opposed to routine of not going to gym.

CURRENT SELF-ESTEEM STATUS: Actually not bad right now. Several days with “my people” has helped with this, specifically with the whole “Hey, you’re not such a freak after all – and even if you are, there are at least 59,999 people just like you in the world, probably more” thing.

SELF-ESTEEM ANALYSIS: Maintain by doing stuff that makes me feel positive. Avoid doing things that make me feel negative. See aforementioned gym routine thing.

CURRENT MISSION OBJECTIVES:

  • Make enough money to pay rent (OPTIONAL: Make enough money to pay rent AND have Fun Stuff)
  • Recruit more music pupils
  • Design computer tuition website
  • Recruit computer tuition pupils
  • Do more writing for Kombo, DailyJoypad and BitMob
  • Hassle other sites for writing gigs
  • Attempt to make use of contacts made at PAX
  • Get into a situation where I can keep the necessity of doing supply teaching to a minimum

First one and the last one are the biggies, I guess. Everything else will contribute to those two. If I can get to a stage where I never have to step inside a classroom again, and I am working entirely on my own terms and feeling good about myself, that’s the goal. That’s the dream. And it’s frickin’ well going to happen.

Also, I’ve totally managed 72 days of blogging without a gap. That’s pretty good going, right? I’ll have a party on post 100 or something.