missizzy

I finished Dispatch on stream this morning. My gameplay was terrible, down in the bottom percentage, but I still very much liked it. I also like how many viewers it got my stream. It seems to be a popular game to watch; mostly I've only been getting one viewer at a time, but I got more both last and this Sunday morning. I might play through it again at some point, if only because there are a few alternate scenes I now really want to see, and I'll definitely play through the second season whenever it might come out.
I'm having to play a few games that are new to me. The first one was Little Kitty, Big City, which I started on stream Friday night, and I truly loved it. I'll do at least a few more Friday nights of it, no doubt. (It can apparently be finished in two hours, but I will no doubt take way longer.)
I've also started uploading my past broadcasts to a YouTube account of their own, including some highlights from my test recordings. I might make some other highlight videos too at some point.
Also these past few weekends I've also been trying to record my latest song. I'd gotten some okay recordings, then this afternoon I got one I felt certain I would post right after I finished recording. I got more hesitant after watching through it, but now I've decided to go with it. And hey, a song from from the Hunger Games movies feels appropriate these days:

I originally intended to stream Friday night, but I ended up watching the Artemis splashdown instead. I've been following this mission with a lot more interest than I've had in space for a while. I still don't trust the motives of any of the the power brokers in space right now, but at this point we're all taking consolation where we can, and in this voyage we took it. I suspect I may not stream every Friday anyway. It may be contingent on whether I feel up to it.
Saturday, on the other hand, has officially become Baldur's Gate day. (Although the Wednesday I have to take off for Hotelpocalypse, I'm hoping to steam it and check into the Elfsong afterwards. But now I'm at the Sarevok Anchev fight, and I spent two hours yesterday struggling to win it. I finally went and fought the guards separately, and I think with them out, I might be able to win it by putting the party on the side ledge at the start of it. Maybe even skip the dialog and start it with an AOE spell.
This morning I streamed episodes 4-5 of Dispatch. Gameplay wasn't very good, but it was still my most successful stream yet. But I also found myself really wishing I could romance Phenonaman. I'm romancing Blonde Blazer, and that's all well and good, but seriously, I *love* this guy.

I just booked a train to Atlanta in late May, and a plane back. Turns out that while Atlanta has a train station, there don't seem to be many passenger trains going there. To avoid having to fly there I'm going to have to catch the overnight train late on Friday, get there the next morning, and hope I can find somewhere to stash my bag for seven hours before I can check into my hotel. And there were no trains going out the day after the live show. It was endure an airport, or endure 15 hours on a bus, and I'm not up to the latter in my middle age. I booked an afternoon flight just to be able to get the airport as many hours in advance as possible.
I've now done two more test recordings. The second, done after I finally managed to completely disable the audio on the webcam, sounded just fine, aside from my keyboard being very loud in it(maybe get foam to put under the microphone?). But then again, so did the test recording I did before my first disastrous streaming attempt. I'm going to try again this coming Saturday, so I'll have to see how it goes then.

Been making a few last minute preparations, including a little bit of promotions in a couple of discords, though I really don't know if I'll get any viewers at all today. Also looked into monetization, though I'm not doing that for the moment. It took an aggravatingly long time to determine whether Twitch will put ads on my stream or not, but it now seems like they can, but aren't likely to bother right now. After the test recording I did on Wednesday night mostly just to see if the sound quality was okay and also if my game would crash (It ran smoothly for the 50 minutes...) I am currently standing at the front of the Counting House, which I suppose will make for as interesting a first stream. I'll probably be streaming Date Everything! and Dispatch over the next week as well, though I'm less certain what I'll stream when I'm done with the latter. It's all happening over here, starting today at 1 PM Eastern.

I think in the future, I may actually hold off on buying badges for AwesomeCon until the schedule is actually announced. I can't do that for any event I travel to, perhaps, but I don't think this one even sells out like that. If I'd done that this time, I'd have gone yesterday and tomorrow, and my foot probably would've been very grateful for the day off in between to boot.
As it is, the highlight of the event for me this year was absolutely Neil and Devora. Doing a podcast together has made the two of them a brilliant double act. They were playing off each other perfectly even before they had cause to demonstrate some of the practical issues of mocap using their water bottles. But the audience also helped with some of their very creative questions; Devora even joked she might come back to DC just for the questions. One of them was what was the last line each of them recorded for BG3. Unfortunately Devora couldn't remember what she'd done last, and Neil couldn't remember the last line, either, but he did remember and relate the last thing he did for it, which now makes me want to play origin Astarion.
I managed to buy a few things as well, including a cute drawing of Mulder and Scully eating Chinese food. Today I also attended a panel of those searching for any signs of life in outer space, which ended up feeling more like a reminder of just how much we have found in space this century, even if we haven't yet found that.
But I am currently planning for my first ever stream to be in a week's time, so now I must buckle down. I finally downloaded OBS this evening, though I haven't tried to install it yet.

Did my taxes this morning. For the third year in a row I resorted to TurboTax, and for the third year in a row it was a quick process. I got a modest refund out of it this time.
Next year, I suppose, taxes might become a more complicated process, if I actually make any money on Twitch. But of course I may never make enough for them to actually pay out. I'm not quite sure what happens then. One would think the IRS wouldn't care about imaginary income you never actually get, but, well.
Today the high is supposed to be in the 70s, and I will likely go out in my continuing quest for enough tights that won't rip after one wear to get me through each work week. Around this time last year my sister gave me the name of an online company one of her friends swore by, but one of the pairs I bought from them lasted less time than other tights I'd bought earlier, and the other has vanished completely, possibly eaten by the washing machine. I'm tempted to look for a place to get me hair trimmed, but I may not have the spoons for that. I haven't now for years.

This morning I tested out the new microphone. Once I'm a sufficient distance away from it (something I'm going to have to get used to), the sound quality isn't bad, but I can hear a tiny bit of flickering in the background. Not the biggest problem while podficcing; it will be an improvement there, at least. Streaming with it is another matter. Perhaps it might not even be audible much of the time, but there are times it probably will be. How to get rid of it I do not know. Maybe I should try to figure out this Razer Synapse thing that I ended up installing when I first plugged it in?
I haven't figured out how to get those two pesky final files off my old computer either. Though one thing I am hoping to go buy today is a new external hard drive. I had already started to suspect that sooner or later, I may need it, and if the old computer can register a connection to it, that would surely be a way to move those files.

This morning I started the day the way I have most days since the beginning of this month, by turning on the old computer and working a certain amount on the Conclave montage I've been working on the past half a year or so, with plans after breakfast to likewise work on the ambitiously long Shadowgast podfic I've been editing for literally years. They're the last two projects left on that computer, since neither is easy to move. My plan was to finish the latter this month and the former next month, before I retire the computer, which continues to occasionally not connect to the internet, though it actually has more often than not.
I came back from breakfast and discovered said computer had suddenly set its screen resolution to 640x480. When, after considerable struggle though apps not at all set up to deal with such an old resolution, I got to the display settings to change it, it offered no choices for anything bigger. I tried restarting, giving in and installing the updates I'd been refusing to do before then, to no change. My computer has decided to make itself nearly unusable at a time when making the effort to fix it is least worth it, but I still had these two projects.
I eventually made Audacity usable again by hiding most of the toolbars. I had less than five minutes left to edit on the podfic, so it is now completed and exported to mp3. I had a bit of a scare when I tried to look it up while setting the metadata and couldn't find it on AO3. I feared it had been deleted, with no indication on whether it was ethical for me to post the podfic or not. Then it turned out I just needed to be logged in. I've called it a day after that. Cover art, full metadata, and posting can wait until tomorrow.
I'm also letting the computer problem sit overnight. The way these things are, it's perfectly possible it'll be back to its old resolution tomorrow. If not, I think I'm just going to move the last of my files over and officially retire it. I was halfway done with the montage, but I think I'm just going to have to do it over.

There is still a mostly smooth-topped layer of snow covering our yard, and it has turned firm, but actually isn't that slippery right now. I was worried about getting the trash bins out to the front when I got home from work just now, especially since we didn't get collection last week and they are currently very full, but I was able to walk on top of the smooth snow so easily I felt like an elf! And the bins rolled easily on top of it as well, at least until I reached the more piled up snow on the curb.
Once again, there is a government shutdown, but once again, there is still money in the revolving fund that pays for the library, and even if things don't go as expected tomorrow, it's hard to think this one will last two months. It all felt very undramatic today.
I have gotten a bit MDZSed over the past few days, starting to read the third volume of the serial while watching the final episodes of The Untamed. I watched episode 45 yesterday, and holy shit, the acting in that one, from Yu Bin and Qi Pei Xin especially. I am now reading enough also to spot adaptational differences, and while there are one or two straightwashing ones I must be unimpressed by, I actually think they've been for the better generally.

Yesterday, after spending the weekend trying to determine the difference between the various most popular and recommended microphones for Twitch streamers, I ultimately instead went for the one recommended for beginners. Which is a much cheaper one, too, but buying it still felt much like committing. I think I can otherwise start with what I've got already, unless I need something to connect the old computer monitor's up as my second one. I actually still need to look up exactly how one does that.
The website currently claims it'll arrive this weekend, but I suspect it's going to end up taking a little longer than that. This is the second weekday in a row everything in the area is closed. Our road hasn't been cleared yet, though at least one car's made its way through since the storm. We were able to get a young man to come shovel our walk, which is a very good thing, because mom and I have now both lost whatever ability to might have once had to manage that ourselves. He wasn't able to get the bottom layer all up, though, and I fear how slippery that might prove over the rest of this week.