Two weekends ago JPP had their first marathon. JPP is a French language kusoge/jank appreciation event that just started up, and used my tech and tools to have their first event. It went perfectly and I had a blast doing it. Then I had an idea: What if we rebroadcasted the event with English commentators on the Big Bad Game-a-thon channel?
This isn't a new concept. We've been working with groups to do language restreams of BBG for our entire history. The idea behind a language restream is you have an event in some language, like English. Then you have a second group who picks up that stream and streams it again, with their own commentary in another language like Japanese or French. BBG historically has had Japanese, French, and Spanish restreams, and I appreciate the groups that do them so much.
Usually the restream is in real time, but there's also the concept of a "Delayed restream" where you stream recordings instead. That's what I wanted to do here (mostly because I was busy helping run the tech for JPP when it was live, hah!). JPP, being a French event full of runs I knew at least a little, seemed like a great candidate for an event for the BBG crew to do an English restream with.
Surely I wanted to boost the new event's reach because I think it's neat, but I had a second motive here: Being an American that speaks primarily English, a lot of the speedrun world just caters to me by default. I don't really need language restreams to be able to access stuff. This was a good opportunity to do one and get some experience on what it's like from the other side. I've worked with groups to do restreams for BBG for years but had never seen the other side of the transaction before. Seems important to know a least a little about if I'm going to run events.
So I decided I'm going to do it, and if anyone in the BBG staff wanted to come along for the ride? The more the merrier. In retrospect I'm a little surprised. Usually I'm so careful about getting buy-in and democratic process about any decision "We" make, but this one I just decided to do. It was intended to be 99% my labor though. Just using the BBG channel to cast it all.
Read More...I keep having a goal to getting back to a simpler routine and it keeps not happening. I'm not really mad about that, but it's definitely a game of trade-offs on what I can do with what time I have.
I haven't really had much free time since just after Big Bad Game-a-thon last year; mostly due to just a series of things happening. Some good, some not. I actually laid it all out in a chat the other day and it shocked even me just how much stuff I've had tossed at my head in the past 5 or so months.
Let's start with just after BBG: In late September I had a medical emergency. I'm fine. What happened was I woke up with a dental abscess and while trying to figure out who to see about that, spiked a pretty high fever. So it's late on a Saturday, no dentist is open, I have a fever creeping up to 103F, and I know I have this abscess. I didn't screw around, I went to the emergency room. Overly cautious? Maybe.
That got handled temporarily, then I actually saw the dentist, which kicked off a chain of procedures to catch up on things I'd been leaving un-caught-up-on for years. I was in a routine of getting looked at, having to recover from work, then having to book another appointment and have something else looked at for awhile. Take care of your teeth, kids. You're going to have to sink a certain amount of your life into maintaining them either way; better it be actual maintenance and not weeks of emergency procedure like I got.
So anyway I was extremely low on spoons during this. Going to a dentist once a week and having things forcefully rearranged then having to recover, just to have to do it again, isn't good for your mental health.
Read More...We just wrapped up Big Bad Game-a-thon 2025. I'm not one to brag but I think it was our smoothest event yet. I say that every year, because we're constantly improving. This one was special though. This year we moved to using the infrastructure I built for restream.space.
To say this was terrifying is an understatement. I tested everything religiously, but you don't really know how things are going to go once you introduce a 54 hour event with 10 staff members and 40 runners all interacting with it in different ways at the same time; you know? But it went marvelously. I have a list of tweaks to make that's as long as my arm, but it filled the core purpose perfectly and everything I had to throw into my bug tracker I'd call "QoL improvements and small bugfixes".
Restream.space, in a nutshell, is a small video content delivery network I'm running off a bunch of linux VPSes that do nothing but shuttle un-transcoded video around to each other, and a control plane that builds a website around broadcast graphics and web players to deliver a full "Marathon" presentation into a single web page. It's a weird combination of a home-run Amazon IVS and NodeCG, but more simple than either of them, and purpose-built for marathons and stream events.
It'd been sitting "ready" for something for months before I finally decided its first event (at least using all the automation and not just parts of it) would be BBG. I spent most of the entire month leading up to the event anxious about this decision.
But it went perfectly.
Read More...Valve and Itch have been in the spotlight for being more or less forced by "Payment processors" to pull certain adult content off their storefronts. The short story of it is Valve pulled a couple of games down while Itch pulled down everything marked mature/adult temporarily and had to sort through their entire library to find certain kinds of content to remove. One of these responses drew more ire than the other, understandably.
I tend to believe this is a factor of how big they are and how much weight they had to swing around to fight back. But that's not really the point of this ramble.
Two of the big things I see repeated over and over in criticism of Itch specifically here:
2025's been a bit of a wild trip so far. Writing, game stuff, and streaming have all taken a somewhat smaller back seat to more outward facing impactful work. I haven't had much to show for it but now I do.
I've been working on a project for about 18 months now to create a solution to allow people to self-host a Discord screenshare like experience. Part of this was trying to provide a solution for people wanting to leave Discord, but leaving Discord brings with it losing their arguably pretty alright voice and screenshare options. You've got Mumble and Ventrilo and those old school options for voice, but streaming? Not much.
I initially started writing OvenEmprex for this purpose. OE sits in front of a video streaming server called OvenMediaEngine and turns it into a Discord-like experience, somewhat. It's a simple web page that watches the streaming server and pops up video players as people start and stop streams, just like Discord does. You still need a streaming software package to push to it, because actually capturing windows/games and pushing streams is really hecking hard, but it's an option.
Well here's the thing... turns out I wrote something much better suited for running events than copying Discord. So I pivoted. OE is still there and is more or less "done" for its purpose, but I moved on to something bigger: Restream Space.
Read More...