Feeling a bit twitchy

For most of this year I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at game streaming on twitch. But the big thing I’m still struggling with (other than the underwhelming nature of my hardware) is that I don’t consider myself that much of a ‘real’ gamer, let alone one that other people would actually want to watch.

Of course, I’ve had some success in the past doing in-person walk-throughs of strategy/exploration games, and I’ve done a few Let’s Plays of times I could con a friend or two into expert-ing for me on KTaNE. But I play mostly a couple of solo and mobile games, and I can’t do FPS (or have good fps) for sh*t, really.

I don’t remember exactly where I first saw someone running a stream of a Jackbox Party Pack on my twitch travels, but dropping in and playing on random people’s Jackbox streams has been a recent pastime/distraction from work. I’ve picked them up now for in-person party gaming and have been s-l-o-w-l-y getting my stuff together to do a stream myself.

But the problem of audience (and a good, decent one) remains. So far, my attempts to drum up interest among people I know IRL has been… underwhelming. Current plan is to just get it going sometime and post in all my socials something along the lines of “HAY GUYZ COME PLAY WIT ME.” We’ll see who shows up.

In the meantime, trying to be a little less of a rando in the streams I visit. Cultivating new social circles among those that already do this sort of thing is probably a good idea too…

New tricks

I never expected when I got into work this morning that I’d find myself explaining the principles and upshots of web-based content management to my 65 year-old father by the afternoon, but life sometimes throws strange curveballs.

This all arose because Dad and my aunt have a little papercraft and greeting card side hustle and he also has been spending some time with establishing an website for the business. Over the holiday, one of my aunt’s friends set up a shared hosting plan and WordPress install for her (which I’ll admit I’d been meaning to do for a year) and of course I was all over that – if there’s one thing I can do for them it’s help them move into a WordPress install. So I took a little time Christmas morning showing my dad around one of my sandbox sites, just so he had a preview of what he and my aunt would be working with.

Then this afternoon, I got an urgent “text for help” from Dad:

“I have downloaded WordPress and am trying to install it on my MacBook…”

I really didn’t have to read any further. I did a facepalm and then gave him a call.

But this is not an “old people can’t internet” story. His misunderstanding of what a CMS was, how it worked, and why they have made the 21st-century internet what it is is entirely understandable. It had just been a while since I’d really thought about it enough to explain it…

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