blaugust Archives - Page 12 of 12 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Changing Religion

I honestly do not remember when I first signed up for Hitbox.tv but it has been some time ago. I have this habit of signing up for everything that comes out if for not other reason than to reserve the name “Belghast” on any given network. I have belghast at outlook.com for example but will likely never use that email for anything considering I am joined to the hip with google products. In all honesty it was not until this week that I even considered using Hitbox for anything… until oftentimes tastemaker Scopique mentioned in a post that he was planning on using it for his website Levelcapped.com in part because he was actually able to get the name Levelcapped.

So being a sometimes devoted member of the internet Zeitgeist I gave it another look. It turns out that Hitbox has the single “killer feature” that I had been longing for from Twitch. As part of the default interface you are able to organize into “teams”, which is a functionality locked away on twitch until you become a partner. There is no way in hell I will ever have enough viewers to reach partner status on any network, let alone twitch. That said I still wanted to be able to create a shared channel for all of the Alliance of Awesome streamers so that we could give that out as sort of a television channel to anyone who was curious what all was going on in a given evening.

The other “killer feature” is the ability to have a configurable delay. By default everything on twitch is delayed by at least 30 seconds. In practice if you are doing HD streaming… this delay tends to be considerably more. Ultimately this delay was factored in for the purpose of competitive match play, but since I don’t really compete doing anything… it just becomes a pain in the ass to deal with when trying to respond to folks in chat. I’m a carebear and so rarely doing anything where prior knowledge of what I am doing… would actually matter at all. So while the stream is not actually instant either it is far more manageable, and probably something similar to the conditions that our oceanic gamer friends have to deal with on US servers.

Hitbox is Beta

The problem with the switch to Hitbox is that Twitch has become so damned ubiquitous that it works with almost everything simply by default. So while the livestreaming and video playback functionality work amazingly well, little things that I have come to just expect don’t function at all. For example after playing with it, I can seem to find no way that actually embeds a video from hitbox into my blog, nor does the documented embed a stream seem to work either. This would not be a huge deal since I try not to embed twitch either… but for the time being both their download your stream and export to youtube functionality also seems to be broken. They mentioned a few days ago on the @hitboxliveHelp twitter account that they should have a fix tomorrow… but at this point that tomorrow was two days ago.

In a day and age when “Beta” has come to mean a highly polished public preview… it is both refreshing and frustrating at the same time to see that Hitbox in fact really uses beta in the appropriate sense of the word. However none of us is really enough to scare me away from the service. For starters it seems like there might be a better integration point between my favorite little social network that could Anook and Hitbox in the near future. Also there are just so many things that are nicer for the streamer. Built in polls, and contests and the whole popout dashboard is extremely all nice. There are so many times that you have a few technical hurdles when you start up your stream, and having twitch spam your friends each time you start and stop OBS gets old. Having a panel that automates the message for you when you are good and ready is awesome. Additionally it seems to actually remember my channel title and the game I am playing, unlike with twitch when I seem to have to rename things half a dozen times each time I switch games.

The Results

All of this doesn’t really matter unless the results are nice. I’ve streamed for roughly five hours now and a combination of three different games. So far I think the end product has been excellent. There was a little bit of tweaking in my OBS settings, but I think all of that is working nicely. If you are curious check out some of the broadcasts below… since you know I can’t export them to youtube or embed them directly yet.

I think overall the stream looks really good, or at least good enough to keep me using the service given all the other advantages. The biggest thing for me is the ability to have the Alliance of Awesome team. So if you are using Hitbox or want to use Hitbox and already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… let me know and I will throw you an invite to the team.

Blaugust Update

I am still very much working on a mega prompts post, that I will likely make a little closer to the event. So far I have had a bit of interest in the proceedings and this makes me happy. My goal is to have sixty or more prompts that folks can pick from when in need of a topic. In part this is going to give me something to fall back on as well when I am having one of those blah mornings where I can’t think of anything to write. One thing that I wanted to make sure folks knew about is the Blaugust Anook community. If you are going to participate please pop out there and join the nook, as I am going to give folks elevated access to advertise their new posts out there.

The truth behind this initiative is a simple one. Newbie Blogger Initiative is like this shot of adrenaline in the arm of the blogging community. While it is going on everything is active and vibrant and regularly updated. That said a few months after the proceedings… folks start to wane a bit. My idea was to have Blaugust a few months after the initiative as a way of maybe kicking up the volume again. For some of the folks who have responded thusfar, this seems to be doing exactly that. At this point however I have no clue just how many people will be participating, but I am hopeful.

#HitBox #Blaugust

A New Challenger Awaits

A bit over a year ago I embarked on what I called the “grand experiment” and idea to force myself to blog something new each and every day. Since then I’ve awoken each morning, and gone through the process of writing a brand new post. At this point I have over four hundred thirty of these posts and I don’t intend to stop the momentum any time soon. There are so many days when doing this is a struggle, but I feel like I am committed to something larger than myself. There are many days the fact that I have gone so long without breaking the chain is the only thing that gives me the drive to finish a post. Even when I feel like I have no inspiration at all, the act of sitting down and working through my ritual seems to cause a post to materialize in front of me.

This past month my wife decided to take on the challenge of posting something every day and she has gone through some of the same struggles I did starting out. There are so many days I felt like I didn’t really have anything worth posting, or that anyone would be interested in reading. It turns out that oddly enough I have this group of readers that are interested in me, and not so much what I happen to be reading about. But watching her go through this struggle gave me an idea. The Newbie Blogger initiative has been amazing and produces some great writers, and gives us a month to focus on promoting this new talent. What I am suggesting is that we follow this initiative up with a challenge of sorts, our own version of NaNoWriMo in a way.

Bonus Round

The act of blogging every day is a truly awesome thing… but I want more from you. More or less I am targeting the gaming blogosphere with this concept. We are all very comfortable writing a post about this game or that, and generally not so comfortable writing about ourselves. One of the big things that came out of my “Grand Experiment” has been a willingness to share my life with you all. Trust me it was not the easiest thing to do, but as a bonus I challenge you all to try and do the same. I am talking baby steps here and not expecting folks to do anything like my “Factoid February” right away. While I appreciate good gaming content, ultimately I care about the person behind the screen and not the persona you develop.

As an additional effort I challenge you all to start being more personal. If something happens of note in your life, even if it is not gaming related… share it in blog post form. This really serves two purposes. Firstly you are letting your readers behind the scenes into your life, and showing that you have the same struggles everyone has. Secondly writing from your own life is a good way to solve the whole writers block issue that will hit you around the second week. Each of us leads a far more interesting life than we think, but I admit I was scared to share too much of myself. I thought I would see everyone that was reading my blog run screaming into the night. Turns out that apparently folks actually liked it, and I have noticed a slow and steady increase in my readership since I started trying to share more of myself in each days post.

A Little Help Along the Way

While August is still a few weeks out, I wanted to get the word out so folks could “psyche” themselves up for this. I will not however be throwing you all to the wolves and expecting you to complete this journey alone. Right now I am working on all sorts of “fodder” to help you spur your creative juices. My intent is to have a huge post or two of blog prompts so that when you are struggling to find something you want to write about… you can cherry pick one of those and create brilliance. Additionally while I am already doing this… we will be in essence embarking on this mission together. As a community we will help each other stay true to the mission.

One of the most awesome things about NaNoWriMo was the support I got from the other members of the twitter blogger community. I would have never reached the goal if not for the support of awesome people like MMOGC and BlueKae just to name a couple. So while I am already doing this and have done it for a year now… we are still in this together. When you resolve to writing each and every day… there is a point at which it just magically becomes easier. I feel like at this point I could sit down and knock out a few paragraphs on almost any subject if needed… and that is a pretty awesome thing. I’ve found this also help me in the working world, as I am never afraid to tackle a project charter or writing a large block of copy. If you endeavor to join this adventure, I promise there will be a hand to hold in the process.

The Prizes

I am still working on the details here, but I want there to be something cool from participating. At the very least you will have earned the right to post an “I Survived Blaugust 2014” trophy on your blog sidebar, but I want there to be something more as well. My plan is to enter everyone that participates in a drawing for something larger. I just have not determined what exactly that “larger” is and some of that will be determined by just how many people participate. Ultimately I will come up with something cool, and will be keeping folks updated as we get closer to the August 1st start date. My hope is that I am giving more than enough warning to let folks prepare for the challenge.

[Edit]

I threw together a quick Anook community for the Blaugust event because I figured it would be the easiest way to coordinate things. Please pop over and join the nook!

#Blaugust