Streaming and Blogging During Lockdown

Right before Covid started I built a gaming PC for the first time, and after about a year of lockdown (~feb 2020), I wanted to make some fun use of it.

First I started to setup to stream on Twitch, making a NanoThePig account twitch.tv@nanothepig. This didn't take too much to make. I setup OBS with my twitch api key, setup some basic moderating (which wouldn't be enough ultimately) and interactions with StreamLabs, and setup some overlays through Gimp+OBS:

At first I mostly streamed Catherine and Disco Elysium, most of my viewers coming from Catherine. It felt lonely much of the time talking to an empty chat, so I became increasingly uncomfortable with it. I wanted it to be purely organic, only mentioning the account to my closest friends but not putting it on social media, so that I could feel like it was purely from merit, but I don't think this was a great choice, and I also just think I wasn't great at it.

After some time I started streaming old games with by friend J. He would come over and we would play Ribbit King or Mario Strikers, and chat with his partner M and her friend E over chat. Sometimes he and I would also play COD over discord and stream it, but that was especially. poor to engage with a chat through, since we would get siloed into our own coversations.

Playing the older games got some attention, especially Strikers, but mostly from kids. This wasn't a big deal but was a big uncomfortable since they would be a bit more demanding in chat, asking us to play Minecraft or other specific games that we weren't actively playing, and then DM'ing us to try to play together which we didn't want to do. Regardless, it felt fun to show old games more, and it let me use the HDPVR I got in middle school to try to make Youtube content.

I remember playing Rage alone and with J and recording the PS3 with it, at the same time I was playing Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and recording it with some chunky screen recording software. I would voice it over as best as a 12 year old could, and then never post it anywhere. I always liked documenting stuff, it never felt like it was for anyone in particular, but instead just like someone would care about this someday.

I made a few tutorials for the HDPVR at this time because it was kind of an aged tool given how popular capture cards were, but it filled a niche. I took a bunch of pictures like so:

With those and more I made a blog post on my original blog attempt (also nanothepig.com

I also followed it up with a youtube tutorial, strapping a gopro to a helmet for lack of a clearer idea of how I could record it:

I streamed for a bit longer until the loneliness of it got kind of oppressive, and then I had a troll in the chat that got to me and made my already heavy disatisfaction heavier. Maybe I'll stream again at some point, but I feel like having a friend or someone paid to moderate feels necessary.

Just to briefly go over it for my own memory keeping, the blog I mentioned did last a bit longer than the streaming. It started out super rough, looking something like this:

The idea was much the same as this site. It was intended as a space to share what I was reading, working on, tutorials I thought may help people, and to discuss some politics. I'm a leftist and at that point was feeling especially driven to exercise my politics. I also built in some integration with my Twitch streaming, mostly just adding the "Offline"/"Online" tag in the navbar that would change depending on whether or not I was live on twitch. The readability/clarity of that is laughable since no one would know what it meant unless I told them (or they clicked on it and got linked to my twitch), but whatever.

The site itself was made with Ruby on Rails and used a Postgres server to maintain my blog posts. It made adding posts extremely easy, but was absolutely over engineered. For my capstone in college I had made a Ruby on Rails project, so it was mostly just what I was comfortable with, since I'm not a great web developer. I used a "how to make a blog" tutorial to get it up and running, which is why its style also looked so sanitary and React-like. I hosted it all on AWS which was a huge pain in the ass, but I thought it was professional and wanted to learn how to do that.

After a year I had already abandoned and forgotten it, but got a harsh reminder that it existed when AWS charged me $40 for ONE MONTH of serving the site LOL. It was a site with around 5 pages, but I think the database made its price skyrocket. I took it down, and let that streaming/blog dream die.

Here I am today, repeating the same efforts, with some of the same illusions and goals. Neocities was recommended by a friend who is a great hobbyist and developer, and it seems really fun so far. Again, my web design is not very strong, but I used a template by ribo.zone (for now at least, and credited along the bottom of every page), so I'm happy with its look and can focus on the posts I want to write. I made some blog post templates and scripts to scaffold them into place so that I can then easily add posts without having to update my indicies by hand. Its all been fun and motivating by far, if for no one else, for me. Documentation and archiving satisfies me to no end, even if its just my own stories.