A Week in Revue...and NOT a Review.
Life is often hectic, unrelenting and indistinguishable from a vaudeville act and last week definitely qualified as one of those, hence the title. Not a review? I'll get onto that bit.
Most of this week was taken up with the tense wait to see what had happened to my beloved new computer which was away being repaired after failing to boot to anything other than a black screen. The experience with tech support over the phone was not the best and seeing as the problem was eventually diagnosed as nothing more than a corruption of Windows 10, it felt a little excessive to have to had sent the rig away to get it fixed. I am not 100% convinced on this explanation but am going to give it a few more days to see how it behaves. I am also going to spen an afternoon backing up OBS profiles and Streamlabs Chatbot in case I have to haul out "Auld Bessie" to fill in during repir time again.
Ah, Auld Bessie - my old YoYoTech rig which creaked along admirably with it's Nvidia 680 GTX card. Streaming Elite:Dangerous was possible with the help of the excellent new Sovereignty Stream Team member Sw33tp34 who had some awesome Twitch-fu to dispense my way so I could keep streaming, albeit at 30fps. This is one of the reasons I love this stream team - the depth of knowledge and creativity is truly impressive. I even had my first meeting with our new Community Manager, Allie, who gave me some excellent advice despite me feeling exhausted, depressed and as flat as a pancake. If you read this Allie - so sorry!! By Tuesday night, things reached their nadir and I had a bit of a meltdown. Ironically, the breaking point was actually a GOOD thing, the wonderful people at Paradox Interactive gave me a press key for Battletech. Here I was with a free copy of a game I have been looking forward to and a ropey rig which, after playing the game for a bit, I was seriously concerned I could not stream. I didn't want to be 'that guy' who got a free key and didn't stream it. I felt devastated.
I recovered from my meltdown however (unlike one of my lance-mates in game..oof... cored and crispy) when I got the welcome news that my PC would return to me on Thursday - the day I was due to stream the game for the first time. This is where the "Not a Review" bit comes in as the game is still under a review embargo with only "First Look" streams and "Lets Play" videos allowed before 24th April. I first encountered this when streaming another freebie, Surviving Mars, and must confess it's interesting to stream a game without giving an opinion on the way the game plays or its features. Reactions are allowed like "oh cool" etc but you're not supposed to start saying things like "right, this feature is broken because.." which can be extra work when you're an opinionated, old git like me. However, I think I managed it- judge for yourself with the link below.
Like I said earlier in this post, I need to get backing up profiles into my gaming-and-streaming habits. Modern tech and the ease of downloading stuff has made me lazy in this respect but the return of my rig was not without frustrations. I had reset OBS and started to rebuild my scenes when Windows updated itself again, bringing a new wave of memory management BSOD's. Frustrated, I rolled back to the previous version of windows and... lost all my OBS work. Gah! Bitter lesson learned in the cauldron of trying to get everything working again before I was due to go live. So, reset scenes, retrieve stream key, furiously find YouTube instructional videos for bitrate and installting VST plugins before deep breath, smile and go live. That was one hectic day and, to be honest, I was relieved when my daughter demanded a daddy-daughter day on Friday so I could skip my usual stream.
And this is all from the point of view from an Affiliate streamer who is growing a happy core of viewers and a steady income from a 30 hour a week job. Can you imagine the pressures on Partnered streamers who do this for a living?
Well, I have now done a portion of the housework, my back is only mildly killing me and the washing machine is going full-force. Can only mean it's nearly time for my Saturday stream! See you in Twitch land my friends.
My YouTube channel is being revamped (Google went ape-shit and reset shizzle) so following the links to my channel will reveal sweet FA at the moment. However, at least now it is branded as Carrumba TV. o7
See my Battletech Twitch VOD here
#BATTLETECH_Game #PdxInteractive #twitch #OBS #Streamlabs #Chatbot