I was a big supporter of Altair when they were getting their crap together. I'm desperate for something to go toe to toe with Twitch that isn't going to just turn around and start treating streamers like some kind of homogenized cash mill. I just want to play games and chat with people; I've been doing it less and less due to burnout and just because every time I start a stream there's some new shitty thing to turn off (if I can turn it off). It's a lot on my constantly strained mental health.
Altair disappeared and took the crowdfund money with them in some kind of weird Spiderman Pointing Meme of blame between them and their payment escrow. I still don't know what happened. Someone made the medium bucks and we got no streaming service. I got left pretty bitter and did a bunch of math that says running a streaming service if you're not already a billionaire-run giga-corp is not feasible. It comes to the tune of "A couple cents per viewer-hour, depending on bitrate; and that adds up to a lot"
That colors my perceptions a lot and I assume anything claiming to be a Twitch killer is lying.... somehow. So when someone started posting on fedi about "A new Twitch killer" I kind of, let's say, doubted it.
So altstream.online! They don't claim to be a Twitch competitor, and they're certainly not. I am at the least convinced they're legit; which on its own was a pretty high barrier to cross given every time someone shows up with a new service we find a hook sooner or later. They're past the point of Altair where Altair made promises and didn't deliver a darn thing at least. But I'm helplessly curious and I went poking at their backend. You can learn a lot just from passively observing traffic after all.
I'm going to spoil this up front since I have a tendency to get lost in the sauce and people misunderstand: I found multiple bad things; some that made me extremely suspicious of what was going on. And then I actually talked to people and found most or all of them have an explanation or are the result of being fed bad expectations by people desperate for a Twitch competitor.
Read More...I have a weird, weird relationship with EverQuest. I didn't play it in its heyday and never experienced it in the way it was truly intended. I instead first played it in about 2019, soloed my way to around level 90 in a very slow slog over the next many months of light play, then moved on when my friend group got sickos mode into Final Fantasy XIV. EverQuest, however, scratches this very particular brain itch I get once in awhile to experience a "MUD but graphical" and I'd long thought of setting something up to play around with it without any commitment or vertical grind wall.
Well I did this yesterday and it turned out to be a process that should have been very easy if not for some giant missing holes in the documentation. So let's try sorting this out so I can show people in the future!
We'll be using the EQEmulator project to get our foundation in place. Ignore everything on this site. What you really want is their more up to date Docs Repo. At the time of this writing their bare metal Linux installer is broken and there is no documentation for it, so we need to look at AkkStack. Its installation guide is here. Following the linked docs will get you most of the way there, but let me condense this a bit.
:: note A couple of caveats before we begin here...
Read More...I'm participating in speedrun marathons again. Games Done Quick is on, I signed up for Licenseathon and Big Bad Game-a-thon is in the throes of its setup process for September. I'm even eyeballing a couple of other events to help out or submit runs for. It's a good time.
A lot of smaller marathons use a tool called Oengus to do submission handling, planning, and scheduling and while for the most part it's a neat tool if you handle your marathon in a very specific manner, it falls down in some places. The worst is pronouns, and that splashes out to some events using it handling pronouns incorrectly too. So I'm going to ramble about this.
Displaying pronouns on overlay has been a thing for about 7 years now. The event most people probably saw the practice begin with is GDQ. I believe Power Up With Pride might have done it first. The practice was met with pretty lukewarm reception when it hit the big events, but now it's pretty normalized; for the better in my opinion.
If you're debating doing this in an event you're setting up, I encourage it...
Read More...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.
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