#PastebinMonday 05/15/2023 Ten Years on Twitch Edition

Ten Years on Twitch Edition

'Sup, doods!

I am “trying” to keep focus on the things that I want to do. The phone reminders are helping throughout the week. It got the Peggle video done and out. The weekend is still a bitch for my brain, however. I'm currently “trying” to create a generic base stream layout for LPS broadcasts and adapt that to each game we play. I'm doing a lot more thinking than working, though. I'm also playing while hurt and not handling it well. I have a bad overeating habit and, in recent times, it literally tears me a new asshole on the toilet and makes it hurt to sit afterwards. I need some more financial security, though, before I can be comfortable seeing a doctor about it. I'm able to save back a few hundred dollars a month from this new full-time job I got this year, but I still don't have enough savings to deal with the emergencies my family tends to run into. Is it still three months of expenses you want to have on hand?

At this point, I'm starting to wonder what it is I want to do—or, more accurately, how to get to the point of doing the things I really want to do. My monkey brain only wants to stream games I like to play for anyone willing to watch for every waking moment of my life. It really wants to skip the boring parts I have committed myself to do to attempt to set myself up for long term success. The video editing and design processes have become uninteresting to me. I'm starting to hate this about myself. Has the passion died down?

I got particularly introspective this past week as I passed a major anniversary. On May 7, 2013, I streamed for the first time to Twitch. It was a speedrun race of Pokémon Puzzle League where I streamed only my game and a timer. It was an S-Hard race that I won. And the rest, as they say, is history—10 years of history on Twitch, to be precise. It wasn't until 2020 when I started archiving all of my livestreams so most of my history has been lost to time. I would love nothing more than to have the time to stream more on Twitch and make more memories that I will be able to keep close and cherish for once.

On that thought, I thought back to my overall vision for the future that I posted in a prior Pastebin Monday update in November 2021. I posted a 42-hour weekly streaming schedule that I would commit to if I ever had the time for it. Upon further review, I now have a slightly different vision for how I would do full-time streaming. Incidentally, it is also 42 hours in total time per week. If there is something here that you would like to see from me more often, you can financially support me on Twitch and YouTube... and maybe I should open that Patreon I talked about soon, huh?

All of the times here are listed in my local Central Time zone.

Every day – 10am–12pm: Morning Dailies (casual games/tasks with casual chat)
How many of you have a game that you log into daily and complete daily quests in for nominal rewards? How many of you have a daily ritual that you do to better yourself, like exercise or learning a language or teaching yourself a new skill? I have some things I do every day and have an interest in sharing them with you while we casually chat. I think I would do this kind of stream on YouTube. There's one game I play I currently can't show on stream, but there are plenty of things I have interest in doing that I can stream. The original plan was to play Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links while learning Japanese on Duolingo. I would have these side by side on stream. And yes, I would this EVERY. DAY. Two hours every day is more than manageable even for someone as out of shape as I am. I could do that now and will do that as soon as my personal goals at the end of this Pastebin are met. This would be the most consistent thing I do. The rest of my streams would likely be done on Twitch.

Tuesdays – 3pm–7pm: Tue-Gi-Oh! (Yu-Gi-Oh! game speedruns)
I will not apologize for my puns. With the rest of this list, I am giving you a warning. I also have a wish to lean back into the thing that got me into the Internet in the first place. I used my name 20 years ago to sign up for a Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG message board that is long since dead. This block would be reserved for speedruns of Yu-Gi-Oh! video games that I really got into as part of my interest in the TCG in the pre-Synchro era.

Wednesdays – 3pm-7pm: Wild Card Wednesday (whatever speedruns I want) or WedNESday once per month (NES game speedruns)
I will use this block to speedrun whatever I want to play at the moment. I will default to my puzzle games I love, but this is my time to flex into whatever I'm feeling like. I would call this “Puzzle Wednesday” by default, but look for Puzzle Wednesday on Twitch if you want to see some PvP puzzle tournaments.
One Wednesday per month, I would also run a special stream dedicated to an NES game speedrun. My top choices currently are Tetris and Arkista's Ring. There are several others that I would enjoy that I have not tried yet.

Thursdays – 3pm–7pm:  Opening Round (golf game speedruns) or THUR-P-G (RPG game speedruns) or Patreon Speed Pick once per month (up to 1 hr length speedrun nomatinated by Patrons)
I enjoy golf games and RPGs. I've done speedruns of both types of games in the past. Stupid pun name aside for the RPGs, golf tournaments tend to start on Thursdays, thus Thursday feels like the most fitting day of the week to look at golf speedruns. I still have stuff I want to do in Mario Golf: Advance Tour, but there are plenty of games featuring Tiger Woods that I enjoyed in my younger years that I would also explore speedrunning.
One Thursday per month, I would also let Patrons pick a game for me to learn a speedrun of, assuming I get enough Patrons to justify it. I want to encourage audience participation whenever I can handle it and this would also help expand my horizons a bit.

Fridays – 7pm–11pm: Friday Night Salt Mines
I want to keep doing things with the puzzle community and keep this tradition going. I suppose I could pivot into a bigger puzzle speedrun stream if there are no takers in the community on any given Friday night. Most everyone in the puzzle community has full time jobs as I do now so the timing isn't exactly flexible.

Saturdays – 3pm–9pm: Saturday Speed Round (viewer choice of three speedruns) or Score Attack Saturday once per month
This is another means of audience participation I want to have happen. I would post in my Discord multiple games I would feel like playing on that next Saturday and the public could vote there for the three they want to see the most. I would probably give people choices to either lean into games I speedrun more heavily or pick up the slack on speedruns I haven't touched as often. This would probably push me into a niche as a variety speedrunner instead of a speedrunner of a series of puzzle games that spans over 25 years. I don't want to be stuck in one genre.
One Saturday per month, I would want to give a go at some sort of score attack. Tetris comes to mind right away as one thing I want to get better in, but the Puzzle League series has time attack modes to max score in as well.

Sundays – 3pm–9pm: Casual Cooldown (casual playthroughs of my choosing) or Patreon Casual Pick once per month (casual playthroughs nominated by Patrons)
At the end of the day, I just want to play games. At the end of a week that demands that I go as fast as possible, I would love to wind down with some other game I enjoy. I have plenty of RPGs on my gaming shelf that I would love to stream. I'm also a sucker for visual novels.
One Sunday per month, I would let the Patrons pick a game for me. Maybe there's something we can do together. Cult of the Lamb? Among Us? There's a lot I'm willing to do.

This is the ultimate goal. Will I ever get here? Not without easing into it, I fear. I'll have to see what I can do when my below goals are met. This is a journey that I hope you can help me complete. After what I've been through for my first ten years on Twitch, I hope that these next ten years can be a lot better for all of us.

Today's (permanent) extra streaming goals:

Goal #2: create a broadcast stream layout for the next LPS minor speedrun tournament game, Kirby's Avalanche.
Goal #3: update the LPS Pokémon Puzzle League broadcast layout to be better automated like the Tetris Attack layout.
Goal #5: script and record footage for my Puzzle League tutorial series. I have some scripts to touch up before feeling comfortable with moving on to recording gameplay. Then I will need to record my talking points and edit it all together. I will still want to take time during the week to do all of that instead of stream. Whether I will be able to remains to be seen.
Goal #6: clean up my own stream layout. I am brainstorming how I want the final theming to be. I probably want to give people multiple options, maybe allow spending bits to change the look. I don't have anything written down yet. I don't expect to get to this anytime soon.
Goal #7: maybe make a universal LPS broadcast layout that I don't have to agonize over recreating every year. Hopefully I wouldn't over-homogenize it like SpeedGaming did.
Goal #8: release the Puzzle League tutorial series YouTube shorts once a day until they're all done. I really do think I need to time the release of the series with a ramping up of my streaming schedule so that I can take advantage of whatever there is to gain from releasing the shorts.

I did confirm that the next minor speedrun tournament is going to be for Kirby's Avalanche. I will either play that or Pokémon Puzzle League on Friday.

That’s my life story for the week. Later, doods!

--Cards