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This morning I really do not have much to talk about so you are getting a super non sequitur image.  Last night I came home, ate some pizza we ordered in, messed with this image for my twitch profile, played a little boy band simulator, and then finally crashed around 9 pm.  This entire week has been odd for me because it has felt like nothing was quite normal.  Monday was a super meeting packed day because I knew I would be in training from Tuesday to Thursday and today will also be a super meeting packed day because anything I could not do on Monday I shifted to Friday.

My key focus for the last few days has been trying to cram as much information as I could about the ITIL framework into my brain in preparation for the certification exam that I took yesterday.  Originally the plan was to take the exam shortly after lunch at 1:35 pm giving me a little bit of time to chill but also largely be in a very fresh state for the test.  The problem is when we first tried to sign me up for the online proctoring the site was having a lot of issues.  It turns out that while we got a voucher to pay for the exam…  they didn’t actually book it and as we started trying to log in to take the test it turned out I still had yet to lock in a time.  The soonest time available was at 4:15 giving me several hours to just kill.

Luckily the training company was a home converted into office space and with it a couple of super comfy couches that I proceeded to chill out on for a few hours.  During that time the trainer and I got to talking and found out that he too was mostly an MMO gamer and was also a long time raid tank.  So for roughly three house we shot the shit and talked about the things we enjoyed playing, and our experiences in raiding and how they ultimately translate to the business world.  Guild leadership and raid leadership were ultimately the things that convinced me that I could in fact handle the fact that work kept pushing me closer and closer to management, so it was a super interesting conversation.  I am wondering if maybe it would be something worth talking about on AggroChat.

The mishaps did not end with the timeframe shifting however.  When you take one of these online proctored tests they have you download this client that ultimately ceases control of your machine while you are taking the test.  Apparently it also monitors like every aspect of your system, and about halfway through the test the proctor warned me that my laptop was about to lose power and that I should pause and plug it in.  Thing is… it was plugged in, so I had to scramble and try a bunch of different wall outlets until I found one that was actually working.  Thankfully I finished with plenty of time to spare allowing me to go back through all of the questions a second time before finally submitting my answers.

The ITIL certification requires that you get 65% and on a 40 question exam that ends up being that you can ultimately miss 14 questions and still be fine.  I ended up missing 5 questions giving me an equivalent percentage grade of 87.5%.  However upon finishing the exam… I damned near had a heart attack because the first number I saw was 35…  for the number of questions I got right.  However my brain immediately assumed that was my percentage and that I had failed completely.  The other person going through training at the same time as me apparently missed 4 so that means both of us passed easily.  Largely all I cared about was passing because my predecessor failed his first time and I did not want to return from class in that state.

It’s weird when your entire week has been consumed with one activity… and then it is finally over without a whole lot of fanfare.  I largely came home and collapsed on the sofa and spent a good chunk of the evening fighting drowsiness.  When my wife said she was about ready for bed around 9…  I opted to follow her and while I had intended on sitting in bed and playing Monster Hunter 4U on the 2DS XL I was asleep before the news came on at 10.  I also slept solidly throughout the night and woke up about 10 minutes before the alarm went off.  In theory I needed the rest because it was a crazy ride of a week.  Next week however I promise that this will in fact return to being a gaming blog.

Lately I have been dipping my toes in the streaming pool once more.  I have this weird relationship with Twitch as a whole and I have constantly tried to break out of team purple to give other services a try.  For a significant amount of time I tried to make Hitbox a thing…  which has apparently been either bought or rebranded to Smashcast.  After that I flirted with Beam.pro the Microsoft offering, which admittedly is pretty great…  but even it got rebranded to the awkward name of Mixer.  As far as any semblance of regular viewers go…  I have been my own worst enemy due to my indecisiveness.

The thing I noticed through all of it is that people treat Twitch as a destination that they go to for entertainment.  Folks only really watched Hitbox and Mixer when I posted a link on twitter and even then… not that many because it was a largely unfamiliar interface.  The key problem I have always had with Twitch is the latency between chat and screen making holding any sort of a conversation extremely awkward.  That negative aside though…  Twitch is the place where everyone already has an account.  This means it is the location that I am already watching the streams of my friends, and when I do stream I often have random people stop by and visit.  That was just not something that ever happened when I did anything on Hitbox or Mixer.  So after much flailing about… I am back and committed once more to team purple.

One of the things I have been dabbling with is StreamLabs, an interface that provides some of the nifty widgets like the ability to have on screen twitch chat and notifications when events happen.  The other day I was playing around on the site and noticed that they offered up a Stream Labs branded version of OBS Studio and decided to give it a shot.  I have long been a proponent of OBS and while I have tried other options… it is the one I always go back to because in spite of its quirks it tends to be the most reliable.  Ultimately what the StreamLabs version promised was better integration with their widgets which in truth… would have been more than enough of a reason to install it.

When first opened it asked me if I wanted to import my scenes from OBS Studio…  which took away the single reservation I had about this experience.  I have a bunch of scenes already set up and I was not sure how I felt about having to go through that process again like I did when I moved from OBS Classic to OBS Studio.  It asked me to log into Twitch, and then managed the whole stream key thing automagically.  Finally it ran a test on my internet connection and set a bit rate based on my throughput…  which may be a little high given that a few people have complained about now having the internet power to watch me.  I ran a speed test for reference…  and as a result OBS seems to think I should be streaming about 4500kbps which seems to be a bit much for a couple of people.

For the most part the experience is exactly the same as the OBS Studio experience…  that is until you hit that big green [Go Live] button and start streaming.  Then it shifts to giving you a view that largely replicates the Twitch Dashboard all the while still giving you some basic control over your broadcast and allowing you to swap freely between scenes.  Even better when you click the big button to start streaming… it prompts you for a Stream Title and the game you are streaming.  So in theory no more going live with the wrong title and game.  There is still the problem however of not giving you a great way to swap the title when you switch between games.

Essentially this one app fixes a lot of the nonsense that happened while streaming.  If it somehow integrates with twitter and allows me to announce the stream it would cut down my interaction to a single screen.  Previously on my second monitor I would keep OBS up in case there were issues or I wanted to swap scenes, a window of the Twitch dashboard up so I could interact with chat and check the health of the stream, and twitter to go ahead and make a post that I was going live.  In all fairness there are also Discord and Slack windows up, but they are not directly related to the stream itself.  The end result was a super busy experience and one that made it awkward to interact with people as they popped into chat.

Now I brought with me a bunch of elements that I had knocked out in Photoshop to give my broadcast some branding.  However not everyone has that option and often times ends up needing to commission someone to create them for you.  This is a great option and at some point I may even do it myself, however just to get started and piddle around with a stream…  you are more than likely not going to go live with anything.  Personally I use these elements to block the chat box when I am playing a MMO just to give me some semblance of privacy.

Inside of the StreamLabs client there is a Library tab that gives you access to a bunch of preset designs that you can then modify on the fly to create some sort of a style for your stream.  While this is not exactly something that I am super interested in… it is really damned cool that it exists.  Basically each design has a “Be Right Back” screen, a “Stream Starting Soon” screen, and then the on screen in game elements. More than enough doodads for someone to start with and then tweak and modify as they go forward and decide what the hell they want their stream to be.

I am still not a good streamer by any stretch of the imagination.  I find it hard to fill the time while I am playing and externalize my inner monologue.  However so far I am super happy with StreamLabs OBS and am starting to dip my toes into the other stuff like setting up a proper channel bot with games and such.  Right now the biggest challenge for me is finding a time when I can set up some semblance of a proper schedule.  At the moment I tend to announce my stream as I am going live and then maybe stream for an hour or two and disappear abruptly…  all things that are not exactly “best practices” for streaming.  For the moment though I am enjoying dabbling in this world again and I guess at the end of the day that is the most important part isn’t it?

I spent most of last night running around hanging out with my friend Grace and doing low rank hunts with weapons I have never used before.  The revelation from the night is…  I really like hammer.  The only problem there is I need to get better at timing my uppercut to boop things in the snoot.  However I did notice I can break a leg nice and fast as well in a pinch.  All in all I dig the weapon and want to play with it more and have upgraded through to currently the rarity 5 ore hammer, and am just a little bit of farming in Elder’s Recess away from the Rarity 6 version that is in parity with some of my other weapons.

I did make a solo attempted at Nergigante and got frustratingly close.  I had the monster limping and with a skull icon hovering over its head…  but that last phase had some brand new tricks up is sleeve that I struggled dealing with.  Namely a combination of knocking shards down from the ceiling and the prolific use of dive bombing.  I feel like I was pretty damned close to finishing… when he managed to pin me against a wall and get my final faint.  After 36 minutes of fighting that asshole…  I simply didn’t have another attempt in me so the rest of the night was fun low rank nonsense with friends.

I’ve had a few people ask me about my gaming set up, namely the fact that I am piping all of the audio for all of my systems through my PC.  The primary reason for doing is for comfort while shifting between PC based voice chat like Discord and console specific offerings like Playstation Network party chat.  It allows me to comfortably have one set of headphones that I like wearing and flip back and forth between platforms without much hassle.  Since I had talked a little bit in the past about what I did to accomplish that, I thought I would just diagram out my entire setup this time.  Yes I did do this in visio…  mostly because I thought it would illustrate it the most clearly.

I like the concept of having all of my systems “on tap” and easily accessible.  Namely I started down this path because I wanted to at least in theory be able to capture video and images from any console that I chose without having to swap a bunch of cables.  The earliest version of this set up revolved around a 5 port HDMI switch which was relatively cheap on Amazon.  As I added in a few other systems that I wanted to capture from… I had to eventually seek out a bigger option and finally landed on an 8 port HDMI switch option from Monoprice.  It was more expensive than I would have preferred but the options for something with that many ports were super limited.

This 8 port switch feeds into the business end of my Elgato Game Capture HD, that I picked up for I think $30 on Craigslist.  At some point I would love to upgrade to one of the more modern models, but for the time being it does what I want it to do and was nowhere close to the $150-200 price tag of an upgrade.  Next up we need to defeat the HDCP lockout, or at least I wanted to… because I hate the concept of PS4 arbitrarily telling me when I can or cannot record something.  This is done using a cheaply constructed HDMI splitter…  so cheap that it unintentionally strips out the HDCP signal coming from the console and turns it into a open signal that the Elgato is capable of recording.

This splitter also serves the purpose of providing me a latency free copy of my video feed that goes directly into the television, as well as the leg that finally connects up to the Elgato and winds its way into my PC through USB.  The first time I streamed with my new arrangement after getting the 4k television… I realized I had a problem.  I had been relying entirely on the television speakers to give me access to game audio.  The problem there is that while broadcasting my voice through my Yeti setup… I would end up picking up a fair amount of background audio from the game leading to a questionable feedback experience.

So the problem at hand was figuring out a way to feed the audio from the gaming systems into my headset so that I could comfortably chat away with an open mic… without causing all sorts of auditory dissonance for anyone listening in.  The only audio out from the television was an optical out port which meant that I would need some sort of a digital to analog converter to step it down into something I could feed into the line in port of my PC.  I eventually settled on this device from amazon, and in the grand scheme of things it has been working excellent.

I had to do some fiddling in the television but I now have the audio being broadcast over the built in speakers and out over the optical cable.  This allows me to wear a headset if I choose to or just turn back up the volume on the television and listen to the playback there.  This also has the weird quirk of allowing me to pick up all of PSN voice chat and bypass their default state of not recording any of the voices.  All in all I am pretty happy with the way things are set up apart from one minor thing.

Right now I have a second monitor hooked to my gaming PC and it feels awkward to cram everything that I want to interact with while playing a game over onto that monitor.  At some point I am contemplating re-engineering this entire set up to be able to include a second machine to game capture.  That unfortunately would result in a top down rethink of the way I have everything set up because all audio would be piping through a second setup.  I think at that point I would have to upgrade to the Elgato Game Capture HD60 pro to give me more options.  So all of this is why I generally just say “I am doing some nonsense” when people ask me how I have things set up.