New Setup

​I have not been streaming much lately - sorry about that! But between the Chicago Cubs being in (and *winning*) the World Series​​​ and closing on my new house, I just haven't had time/energy. For the last week, my evenings have pretty much looked like: get home, load car, take boxes to house, unpack while surrounded by screaming kids, go home, watch second half of world series games, play DK64, go to bed. Even if I had energy to stream, it would have been maybe an hour and a half, and that's just not long enough to justify setting everything up.

Setting everything up? Well, for pretty much the entire time I've been streaming, setting things up has been a big ordeal. My wife didn't want a big CRT just sitting in the middle of the living room (and frankly, neither did I). So every time I streamed, I had to go get the TV, set it up, pull a box with my SNES out of its spot, plug all the cables in, get my computer set up, and then get everything turned on. It would take 5-10 minutes every time, and for tear down.

No more! In our new house we have an office. And there is enough room in that office for two desks. So I now will have a place where my TV and consoles will be always set up and always connected!! Now, if I want to stream, I just have to sit down, push start, and I'm playing! I fully expect this to mean more (or at least more consistent) streams, since half the times I wouldn't stream were just because I didn't want to deal with setting everything up. Not only that, but I have a wired connection to my laptop, and early impressions on the internet at my new house is that it is *very* fast!

MANY thanks to my wife for agreeing to let me set that stuff up there! It's still not maybe the best looking setup, but it is so much more functional. Don't worry, honey, I'll try to keep it classy. ;)

In other news, I finished DK64. 101%, of course. I ended up having a decent amount of fun with the game, enough that trying to collect everything (yes, I did even get all 500 bananas in each stage) was something I was motivated to do. But MAN that game has a lot of weaknesses. The controls and camera alone could have used another few months of testing - not to mention some of the serious design flaws. And I absolutely *HATE* anything they make you do with Diddy's jetpack. I won't go into more on this - but in the end I'm really glad that I played it. It helped with #tooiewithdrawals.

It's tournament time, and my first match is Wednesday night. I am *not* prepared for this at all, so hopefully I can come out and at least get sub-50. Should be able to put in a lot more work and de-rust over the next few weeks, so maybe I can drop that down to 41 before the JRTA marathon race I'm in. I also am pretty disconnected from everything, so I have no idea how the scheduling and race commentary and all that stuff is going to work. But I want to be involved in some of it. I'd like to comment a few races with Zera and Claude (maybe the semifinals/finals?), so we can get used to each other before the AGDQ relay commentary, as that will be pretty important to do well.