February 22, 2015

January flew by and now February is doing likewise. Where is the time going.

I slept in until 9:30AM this morning but I was still able to finish reading the textbook chapter I needed to before lunch. I planned on eating lunch at noon and finished reading a minute or two after that. I still had my phone on silent and when I checked it I saw a text from my brother asking if I wanted to go to lunch at one o'clock. So instead of making lunch I hopped in the shower and eventually headed down to Chipotle.

My brother ended up being postponed about twenty minutes but it ended up working out because had that not happened I probably wouldn't have gotten to see my friend who was a few people ahead of us in line when we walked in. She jumped back to us and we talked while we worked our way through the line. She was having an issue at work and they were disrespecting her pretty hard so she decided to take a half-day and pick up some Chipotle on the way home. Hopefully things are better for her when she goes back.

My brother and I talked a lot about video games because that has always just been our go-to conversation but we also expanded that today and probably spent more time talking about other things than we did video games. That was pretty cool. Through these lunches I feel like I'm finally getting to know him a little bit.

When I got home I messed around with my Elgato and played with streaming on Twitch. It took me forever to figure out the sound and in the end I still haven't quite gotten there. At first the sound completely crapped out on my desktop. Even when I plugged everything back in how it was I couldn't get any sound, despite the little green bars bouncing up and down showing there was sound. And it worked just fine through my headphones and through the TV (which I'm assuming was going over HDMI). Just not the built-in speakers on my monitor. It also worked when I plugged in external speakers, so I don't know what was happening. After some tweaking I got the sound to come out of the built-in speakers but I think it was just playing the sound that was going through my headphones because it was also outputting the microphone sound. But I couldn't find out a way to turn the built-in speakers off, even when I turned the volume all the way down on the computer, without also killing the sound that the Elgato was recording. I think my solution will be switching out my monitor with the one I have that doesn't have built-in speakers. That is the monitor the Elgato was hooked up to before so I think that is why I didn't have this issue in the past. We'll see.

I had the Elgato hooked up to my laptop because I've heard that is good for taking some of the strain off of the computer you are playing your game on. In my experience the Elgato doesn't really effect gameplay too much, at least compared to other options, but every little bit helps. I eventually ignored the sound issue and did a little test with Minecraft, just running around a little bit and seeing what it looked like on Twitch. It looked like crap because the quality was so low, but I think that is because you have to be a partner or have so many followers/viewers before you get quality control options. I don't know. It was still cool though. I don't know that I will ever really stream because the idea of sitting alone in my room and talking to myself seems weird, but the fact that it can be done is cool. I'm also vaguely toying around with the idea of doing something in Minecraft for one of my assignments and making a video out of it, so I wanted to get the Elgato working, but I probably won't end up doing that anyway.

After dinner I went over to my brother's house to play video games. We were supposed to do that last Sunday but it snowed and I slid into a curb, so it didn't work out. There was no snow tonight though so it was all good. We started off taking turns on BF4. I had one halfway decent round but I think my K/D was 0.5 so it still wasn't great. Then we played Call of Duty: Advanced Warfighter. We started with a gametype where you face increasingly difficult waves of enemies. I generally do bad at though but we ended up doing alright, despite me not having played a CoD game in a really long time. Then we tried a round of zombies online and that didn't go very well. I suck at zombies and our other teammates also sucked so we were doomed from the start. I did alright with a shotgun but it didn't take too long before I became completely overwhelmed by zombies. After that I played a couple levels of the campaign, which I enjoyed. The game itself looks a lot like a mash-up of CoD, Halo, Blacklight, and maybe some Gears of War. And the story kind of reminded me of Resident Evil. But it was fun. It was also fun getting to play video games with someone. I very rarely get to do that and it makes games way more fun.

And I stayed over there way too long so it is now after 12:30AM and I need to wake up in the morning for work. Not looking forward to that. I'm going to stop typing now so I can maximize the small amount of sleep I'm about to get.